Writing Retreat 2024: 7

Last night I was set­tled in, ready to just watch a bit of TV and then go to bed, when my dar­ling wife texted me:

If the skies are as clear there as they are here, you need to go outside.

So I stepped out onto the patio and yes, yes it was pret­ty clear here. I gath­ered up my cam­eras and tripods and hit the road.

I set up on a grav­el road not too far from town—if I want to, I could prob­a­bly bike there—and snapped a few sets of Milky Way pho­tos. With the 11–16mm lens, I was shoot­ing ten-minute batch­es of 30 sec­ond frames, 11mm, f/2.8, with the ISO chang­ing each ten min­utes: 400, 800, and 1600. I want­ed to see what I could get from the dif­fer­ent ISO settings.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly the dew crept onto my lens—or, more pre­cise­ly, the UV fil­ter I have screwed on over the lens. If I was smart, I’d have removed the fil­ter and re-done my shoot­ing; I think now it was the fil­ter hold­ing in a bit of heat that caused my dew prob­lems.^[1]Appar­ent­ly the sim­ple hack for dew is to wrap a cou­ple hand warm­ers around the lens; you can hold them in place with tape or a beer cozy. Filed away for lat­er exper­i­men­ta­tion.

I man­aged to get two stacks from the ISO 1600 run, and they look pret­ty good, I think. One is 8 images deep, and the oth­er is 10.

I also got a stack of 18 images from the ISO 400 run, and… Well, you can judge for your­self, but I think ISO 1600 is the sweet spot between “detail” and “noise” (at least for me). Maybe ISO 800 would work, if I can keep the lens from mist­ing over…

Inter­est­ed in prints of my pho­tos? Let me know, and we can work some­thing out.