The aurora data were pretty meh last night, but I went out anyway and got some shots of the Milky Way climbing in the east. The video is the better part of an hour’s images, all shot at 11mm, f/2.8, ISO 3200.
The Milky Way on the long weekend
astrophotography
Lunar eclipse
On the evening of May 15, 2022, the Earth’s shadow fell completely across the face of the moon.
… and it happened early enough that I was still awake, so I took my camera and tripod out to the sidewalk and snapped a few dozen photos. These three are my favourites.
Startrails and half a moon
There wasn’t any aurora visible, but I got 20 minutes worth of Earth’s rotation under a half moon.
Some faint aurora
It’s been a while since I went out chasing aurora. Tonight the clouds stayed away, and the temperature, while chilly, didn’t feel like it was going to kill me. I got a couple shots of the aurora, faint and hugging the northern horizon…
…and also an hour or so’s worth of star trails, including what looks like an iridium flare. (It looks like my camera moved at some point early in the hour. I didn’t jostle it; maybe the wind shifted it slightly.)
Favourite images, 2021
Some of my best photos (well, in my opinion) of the year that was.
Continue reading “Favourite images, 2021″Star trails, tonight
I didn’t catch any meteors, but I saw a couple while I was setting up the camera. Oh well.
Aurora — Oct. 11th, 2021
It was quite a show last night. The aurora covered the northern sky, east to west, and reached up overhead. For about 15 minutes around 11:15pm, it looked like the videos you see that are shot up in the north: bright, sharp, and frenetic.
The image at the top is a panorama, 6 photos, stretching just about 180° from west to east.
Some of the photos in the gallery below were taken literally 2–5 seconds apart.
It was the best show I’ve seen in decades, and here’s to more active shows in the months and years to come.
Nerdy details: all images were 11mm, f/2.8. Exposure times varied between 1 and 5 seconds. ISO was either 1600 or 3200.
Star Trails, late September
I was hoping for aurora, but it wasn’t there. But the stars keep moving, and so I present these two nights’ trails.
eppur si muove
Writing Retreat 2021: The week in review
Last week I was at a rented cabin up at Minnedosa, writin’ words and takin’ photos. I had a bunch of goals for the week, but how’d I do?
Continue reading “Writing Retreat 2021: The week in review”Writing Retreat 2021, day 5
Thursday, I:
- Worked some more on “The Slow Apocalypse” (minor edits in several sections, and a new chapter in the “What we will lose the fire” sequence, excerpted below)
- Also worked on the “Praise the Torch” outline—I feel like I’m getting close to endgame, but I keep going back and adding things in so they’ll pay off later
- Watched a truck try to maneuver a new cabin into the cabin area (eventually they did it, though they had to trim a couple evergreens back)
- Drove back out to Spruces for some more Milky Way photos (it was calmer, and I got to listen to the waves on the shore and the occasional loon)
Jane had fallen asleep. No, that was too gentle a term for it. Jane had collapsed into unconsciousness, and soft snores, well-earned, came from her bed. Night had fallen, outside, and Mímir paced slowly back and forth in front of the window, looking out onto a view of parked cars under a light dusting of snow, six stories below, the lot illuminated by great lights, bright white fringed in violet, on tall, thin metal poles. The boy slept against his shoulder, wrapped in a white-and-blue hospital sheet of napped cotton fleece.
Mímir wondered what his dreams might be, if they would even make sense to anyone not a newborn.
From “The Slow Apocalypse”
The two images above were taken with my 50mm lens, which results in a much tighter shot than the 11–14mm that I usually use for night photography. Both the images above are composites; the one with the trees is 2 shots merged into one (you can probably see the seam), and the other is a stack of 6 images, manually merged, to try to bring out the detail in a segment of the galaxy.
The image at the top is one of about 200, the only one where I caught a Perseid meteor in the frame. (I did see quite a few last night, about a dozen or so, including three very bright ones. I think the one in the photo is one of the earlier ones, and I remember thinking after it had burned up, I hope I got that on camera.)