Watch Proxima Centauri run...
Prox Cen is the nearest known star to the Sun (1.29 parsecs = 4.22 light
years), and it is moving quickly across the sky at nearly 4 arcseconds
per year (it would traverse a degree in only about a millenium). It is
a dim mid-M dwarf, and appears to be bound, and orbiting, the bright
pair Alpha Centauri A & B (two stars much more similar to our Sun;
see paper by Wertheimer & Laughlin 2006).
Here is a movie made up of 5 scanned images from photographic plates
of the region near Proxima Centauri taken between 1975 and 1993.
The region is near the Galactic plane, so there are hoards of background
stars (which are moving much more slowly than Prox Cen).
The individual images are taken from a query of the USNO Flagstaff Station
Integrated Image and Catalogue Archive Service. The service can
produce jpgs of all of the scanned-in plates available for a
particular region of sky. One can then sort the plate jpgs by date and
save them as an animated gif , e.g. in linux
convert -delay 20
-loop 30 -adjoin 1.jpg 2.jpg 4.jpg 5.jpg 6.jpg GIF:movie.gif
