NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2021 Dec 20, 17:58 -0800
Jim Rives, you wrote:
"I think by this is from the ESA launch site in Kourou, French Guyana... from which a few knuckle biting minutes will be spent on Friday morning at the launch of the James [Webb] Telescope... "
Ah, that would have been timely, but Kourou is too far north for this photo. Of course, it's a great place for launching many satellites, located only 5° north of the equator!
We know it can't be a location north of the equator from the orientation of Orion. Whenever you see Orion in the sky (or in a photo), look for the Orion North Arrow. It points at the north celestial pole (Polaris nearly) and therefore indicates both true north and latitude (reminder in the image below). If we slice out the section of the original all-sky photo with Orion and the ground below it (see next images), we can tell that it's tilted down by a substantial angle. This implies that the latitude is more than 20° south of the equator at this observing location. With a real sky we could be much more specific about the latitude. In a photo like this, it's only a first guess.
Frank Reed