Category: Photos

Jupiter

Posted on by Patrick
Jupiter and some of its moons

Last week­end, as Jupiter approached oppo­si­tion, I went out into the back­yard with my cam­era and tri­pod to see if I could get a pho­to of it.

Behold, Jupiter and the four Galilean moons. As near as I can work it (thanks to this handy cal­cu­la­tor), we’ve got (bot­tom-left to top-right) Io, Europa, Ganymede, and (way off to the side) Cal­lis­to. The pho­to was tak­en June 7, 2019, just before 11:15PM Cen­tral Day­light Time, if you want to check my cal­cu­la­tions.

Pho­to info: 1 sec­ond expo­sure, 250mm, ISO 1600, f/5.6. Pho­to tak­en in RAW for­mat, processed with Dark­table. Cropped from a larg­er image to show the detail.

The Milky Way

Posted on by Patrick
Night shot of the Milky Way

I’m still learn­ing how to process RAW images using Dark­table on Lin­ux. I think I’ve found a few good tuto­ri­als, but I need more prac­tice. I’d like to learn how to remove noise with­out sac­ri­fic­ing the sharp­ness, for exam­ple. (Maybe I need to shoot at low­er ISO and then stack and align the pho­tos?)

Any­way, I shot this south of Bran­don on the evening of May 31st (or maybe real­ly ear­ly on the morn­ing of June 1st). Enjoy!

Ride for the Breath of Life

Posted on by Patrick
Bikers on the road between Sandy Lake and Rapid City

This week­end I joined the Bran­don Kins­men club in putting on the 2019 Ride for the Breath of Life, sup­port­ing the research done by Cys­tic Fibro­sis Cana­da.

It’s a pok­er-der­by ride, about 200km in length, with stops in Bran­don, just out­side Minnedosa, Sandy Lake, Rapid City, and then back to Bran­don.

I was the offi­cial pho­tog­ra­ph­er, and so I drove the whole route, stop­ping every so often for some pho­tos.

  • Dozens of bikes at the rest stop out­side Minnedosa
  • Approach­ing Sandy Lake
  • The route, more or less

More pho­tos

More star trails

Posted on by Patrick
Star Trails

You’re not get­ting tired of these, are you? I hope not, because I’m not plan­ning to stop.

This one was shot in the wee hours of Fri­day, from about 12:10 – 1:10 AM, behind cab­in 650 at Elkhorn Resort. You can see the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion streak­ing by (I saw it go over­head, too, and I waved to the crew). Also, there’s a short mete­or streak in the low­er third, on the far right.

Time­lapse of the trails. Approx. 75× actu­al speed.

Nerdy details: 219 images @ 15s, f/2.8, 16mm, ISO 800. No dark frames. Stacked using a Star­trails plu­g­in for GIMP.

Bike Ride

Posted on by Patrick

It’s a long week­end Mon­day here in Cana­da, so I went for a nice long bike ride today. 23km and change, in a bit under two hours. There was quite a wind out of the east, so I’m hap­py with that time.

I had my cam­era with me, and so I snapped a cou­ple pho­tos: a goose land­ing in the riv­er, above, and a train under the 1st Street bridge, below.

Train under the 1st Street Bridge

I didn’t get a pho­to of the fam­i­ly in the not-yet-open splash park on 1st Street south of Rich­mond (Kins­men Park, I think), mak­ing do with a water-gun fight.

March star trails

Posted on by Patrick

This past Sat­ur­day, the sky was clear and the auro­ral fore­cast looked promis­ing, so I drove out to a dark spot to check out out. The auro­ra, if it was there at all, was a very faint smear at the extreme north­ern hori­zon. But I had bought a cof­fee, so I stuck around long enough to get some star trails.

The pho­to is about 150 images, 10 sec­onds each, ISO 800, f/2.8, 11mm, all stacked in GIMP. The wax­ing half-moon lit the fore­ground for me.