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Spent last weekend at Waterville Valley at the Whitehead retreat. A productive weekend full of astrophotos and other technical shooting. oh, and some science.
As usual, a shoutout to Sue-Jean who drove us around in the dark looking for "Bob's Lookout," which turned out to be just a few meters away from where we thought it was (but it was, well, dark; we ended up on the golf course). Friday night at the retreat turned out to be perfect - totally clear, and cold enough to have crisp viewing. It was so amazing that Muhammed looked up and asked why there was so much haze running across the middle of the sky. That, my friend, is the Milky Way.
Noah and I had tried doing some
astrophotos a few weeks ago, which involved driving down to the Blue
Hills at night, avoiding being killed by a truck which spent a few
minutes no more than five feet behind us, and trying to knock on the
door of State Police barracks for directions. That particular shoot did
not end all that well, largely because of large amounts of sodium
lighting in the sky and a very bright moon, but there was clearly
promise. So we were pretty excited to go up to the retreat, and in fact
had called each other and left reminders to bring tripods and other
relevant gear.
Most of these shots were taken
ISO800, f/5.6 or so, and are about a minute long. As you can see, even a
60 second exposure shows slight trailing, particular when the camera is
pointed far from the pole. On one hand, it's good for noise handling
because the star trails are clearly not speckle noise. On the other
hand, it's not quite a perfect image, and it precludes longer exposures
to really bring out the glory of, say, the Milky Way, or other deep sky
objects. The solution to this is to buy an equatorial mount (~$100) and
a clock tracking drive (~$50), which is meant for small telescopes but
can easily support a camera. With a well-calibrated tracking setup and a
long lens, we could conceivably knock off some of the easier-to-find
deep sky objects, like the Orion Nebula and the Andromeda Galaxy. But
I'll probably need another couple gigs (and some decent flash gear)
before I think about getting something so specialized.
Turned
out that seizing the moment on Friday was a very good idea - Saturday
was cloudy and Sunday was raining. But for a time on Saturday I had
time to go hunting insects, and an airborne boss.
