Red alert!
It came in as an amber alert to my phone (no missing child). I downloaded an aurora app to give me heads up on good nights for viewing the northern lights. There is a caveat. The weather has to cooperate as well. No clouds, no rain, and a dark sky. I would add that a suitable background scene helps. That said, any aurora at all would be nice!!
I was alerted to the possibility of an aurora in the second week of our trip. Thereafter I was up nearly every night…. Don’t ask and don’t mention the times I woke Colleen with the camera clicking away wakening her from a dead sleep. Yes, she can really snore loud when she is in a deep sleep. But! She never seems to wake herself.
We were late in the year for aurora activity. Green is apparently more common and red is more rare.
As I said any aurora would do. Any!! I spent many a night up, sleepwalking, shooting the night sky….until… Well! There it was. Unmistakable! An in my camera and on my data card!! I shot this!!
It was all but impossible. The gear was wrong. The exposure was too long to be handheld. A lot of things came together in a very special way.
Colleen slept through it. I had mixed feelings about waking her. But the light was barely seen by naked eye without camera. And so she slept and saw them the next morning. Was I right to let her sleep soundly? She just slept so soundly, a sleep without snoring at all.
End? Beginning.
I do not like change. Ha ha! I am changing all the time. Ha!
I have multiple Lightroom catalogs. The most recent in heavy use is from 2016 holding about 600k images. The 5tb hard drive was full! It holds all of my images up until now. That would be all digital since 2003 and all slides since the 1970’s. It adds up!
I am trying to stay organized. Logic? Legacy. It would be easier for someone coming after me to sort images if the catalog had some logical progression. Or… was it always just chaos?!
It is the subject of this post. A logical break. The photos hence will be on a new 5tb external drive. These are among the first to upload. It was in September 2023. Of course, we were traveling when the transition came. It’s not perfect in logical thinking. But from this point all the digital assets will be going forward on this drive. Do you care? ??? For me it is just housekeeping. Someone may find this post and realize that this was the break.
Common Ground fair, Maine, 2023.
People. Stars. Turkeys! Why did the turkey cross the road? This was the start. I hope it goes on for many more years. Who can know what the future brings?
Auspicious? Inauspicious.
Full day
Road trip – to Maine. Twelve hour drive. It was entertaining. Gas prices were higher. $3.99. Bridges! We shoot bridges. Rising Tide Co-op. Colleen loves the raw milk and their yogurt. Ok!
Sunrise! Sunset! And, the stars out at dawn and at night! There is so little light pollution as to make it a challenge to shoot the stars. There is a lot of beauty in the world. Sadly, we just can’t seem to all get along.
Stars
Well, it is a challenge to shoot the stars. Expsoure, ISO, focus, light pollution…. It all conspires to make it quite difficult. Tripod, a must. Manual settings. You have to manual focus. Shutter speed varies. ISO varies but stays fixed.
Ok. How? I set ISO up to 51,000 but settled around 25,000. Shutter can be up to 20 seconds. But the stars start to get blurry. The earth moves. Ha! It’s hard. I thought I had it a bunch of times only to be disappointed in Lightroom. So, the experiment continues unless the approaching tropical storm/hurricane stops me in my tracks.
Comparable
Blood moon – lunar eclipse. I am a failed Astro photographer. My attempt with a telescope ended in a return package to Amazon. It has rained for more than a week straight. Fog was present the past several days. A miracle occurred and the clouds parted at the appointed hour. I actually had fair detail of the moon in my camera. I was deceived. I thought I saw partial cloud cover as the eclipse covered part of the moon in the lower left quadrant. Then?!?!! My exposures showed the “blood moon!!”
Hey! It ain’t great. But I got an image (s). I shot at ISO 51200, 1/15, f6.3 400mm. Do you care? Do you understand the settings? I was surprised at the image quality myself. I was surprised to have anything on the sensor to review after I pressed the shutter. Cloud cover? Nope?! I did it! I can say that I did. My image was comparable to those in a casual internet search. The best news, this was my image. May 15.
Astro what
Okay! So, Colleen tried to buy me a telescope for Xmas. She spent big $$$$ and ordered a special camera ready telescope after much research, much angst, and after consulting with Liz, our family astronomer. I have dabbled, miserably, in some astrophotography. With anticipation and then great disappointment (Colleen’s), the telescope never shipped, never arrived. We saved big $$$$. Colleen cried inconsolably. Everyone knows it is impossible to get me a present. I tend to buy whatever I want. So, there is no wont in my house.
Amazon prime came to our house – inadvertently. Amazon prime day had a sale on beginner telescopes. The rest, as they say, is history. The learning curve is high. First and foremost is light pollution. I discovered the technical limitations of attaching a Nikon camera to a Celestron telescope. Focus in the dark was dismal. The earth moves at about 400 meters/sec. I thought diving was challenging? The stars are dots of light – pinholes in black paper.
My point and shoot Canon got better focus of the moon than the spiffy telescope. Risk/benefit, or, bang for your buck?; I chose the camera. The stars are not a subject I will pursue. Amazon gave me a refund. End of story.
Once in a lifetime
Photography of the night sky is an entirely different subject and one I am not likely to master. The skies cleared after a cloudy rainy day and we got to see the confluence of Jupiter and Saturn. Ian and Liz saw the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter. I got two white dots. Actually, my camera got the dots. I could only see one by naked eye. And if I shot long exposure, there was streaking due to movement of the planets – us and them. But hey! I got something. …. Two bright lights in the sky. That was exciting. ??? umm… sort of, kind of, oh! What the heck! It was night photography. Hubble telescope, we ain’t. This event, this close happens about every 2000 years. Nice. I’m glad I was here for this one.
Scared
I was in the closet. Don’t ask. We have a window in a closet. Would that make it a room? The window faces northwest in the direction of the Comet Neowise that was in the news. A challenge. I don’t do astrophotography. I still don’t. The weather was cloudy on most nights. Hey! It was the steamy hot part of summer. Nada! Nothing! Nuthin’! I never knew for sure if I was looking in the correct part of the sky. Urban light pollution was abundant. The effort was a miserable failure. Scary? I was in the closet and couldn’t hear Colleen calling. She nearly had a heart attack looking for me. Sorry. I came out of the closet with moon shots. (poor choice of words? Don’t ask.) Discovery?! There is a man in the moon. I have seen him. The ancients were right. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ with it.
White dots, black background
Astrophotography. It requires a whole new skill set. It’s another language to locate stars in the sky. I was never particularly good at locating the North Star. It’s about as easy for me as to see duckies among the clouds above. I’m hopeless. I could never follow trail signs to get that Boy Scout merit badge. If you take me somewhere, I will always get home again. But, certain things are complete confusion for me. I sought that elusive Neowise comet streaking through our skies. It won’t be back for 69 hundred years. How about that? I won’t be here when it returns. Darn! I got a bunch of white dots on a black field. You may laugh. Please! There was a single streak. Aha! The comet?! Nope, probably camera movement. It’s not the tail. Settle instead for another flower picture. It looks like it’s in the daisy family. Alas, I don’t know its name either. But, it’s a better pic than my astro shot.
photobackstory 