Night Skies

The moon... crisp, clear skies with no light pollution help
in capturing some crisp crater detail.

For the most part, the weather at the lake has been beautiful. Most of the clouds and rain have been at night. Getting the rainy weather only at night has been great and makes for a lot of beautiful, sunny days but it really puts a damper on any photography of the night skies.

Fortunately, we did have a few nights of clear weather at night... very few. On one such night, I grabbed my tripod, my best camera, a couple of good lenses, and a wireless remote shutter release and headed outside to the dark and very buggy deck.

One of the newer cameras I have been using is amazing for low-light work but I am still learning what it can do and trying to figure out how to do different things such as shooting night skies. The unique thing about shooting night skies is that each exposure requires a few minutes plus a couple of minutes of adjusting settings... over and over... until you get it right. Just shooting a handful of photos can quickly become a time consuming project and you'll often be left with only one good image!

Focusing in the dark is a difficult task as well. Autofocus simply does not work on a tiny star so you must use manual focus... in the dark... trying to see clearly enough on the little LCD screen on the back of the camera so you focus on this tiny, distant star. The whole process can be tedious and very frustrating when you get back to you desktop computer only to find that you missed the focus by a little bit.

For the above shot of the moon, I used one of my oldest and least expensive cameras... my $75 special which sports a Kodak sensor. There is just something about this old CCD Kodak sensor that I love! 

The starry night skies were shot using a newer camera with a huge full-frame sensor. Each camera requires different techniques and shooting a photo of the moon is vastly different than shooting a starry night sky. You just need to know which tools to use for the task at hand and how to use those tools effectively. 

Considering I only had an hour or so on this particular night to shoot the crisp night sky, I managed to come away from this endeavor with a few really nice images. I wish I had the time and energy to shoot more astrophotography... and, I wish the weather was more cooperative when I do have the time and energy!

The two overexposed, bright blobs on the left side of this image are Jupiter and Venus.

I figured I'd add a shot which is easily recognizable... the Big Dipper in the consellation Ursa Major.