Since I arrived a little early, I learned that I was the last member of the general public to leave the observatory before Covid shut the place down and was also the first person to return. It was good to be back. This afternoon we learned a lot of specialized camera techniques designed to make shooting pictures at night a little easier. I know my way around a camera pretty well, but I learned a lot that I didn't know before. Nobody could answer my questions about how to avoid losing things in the dark. I was very careful tonight, but I did end up losing a small piece of my tripod. I don't know how it fell off, but it's a safe bet that I'll never see it again.
I think I got some nice shots tonight, but nothing is finished yet. A lot of astrophotography is about the processing you do afterwards. To get the best images, you take a lot of pictures of the same thing and then stack them all together. This eliminates the grainy look you see in some night sky photos. We're going to learn how to do this tomorrow.
One thing I learned tonight was that I'm not really made for standing outside for six hours on a cold night. My feet were killing me when we finished our photo session around 1 AM. I definitely showed my age every time I had to kneel down and get back up again. It's hard to set the camera when your hands get really cold as well. I'm not complaining though. It was a memorable evening. The sky was even clearer than it was last March. It's amazing what you can see on a dark night. I saw at least ten meteors tonight, and there wasn't even a meteor shower. If you look carefully, you can often see satellite crossing the sky. I should have brought my binoculars, but I had way too much heavy stuff to carry already.
It's a good thing I was driving slow on the way back to the Prude Ranch after the workshop was over for the night. I almost hit a deer. It was a huge buck with quite a rack on his head. When I was walking this morning, I saw Mountain Lion tracks. There are lots of critters up here. When we were up on the mountain tonight we saw someone shining a searchlight way off in the distance. This was in an area where there weren't any roads, so everyone wondered what was going on. "Some rancher is out hunting wild hogs," we were told.
I'm going to sleep late on Saturday morning. At least I hope I will. I should have written the blog earlier, but then I wouldn't have had anything to say. Daily blogging and astronomy aren't really a great mix, because both happen at night. At least I've finally figured out how to backdate a post so it will appear on the correct day. It may say I posted this late Friday night, but it is really the wee hours of Saturday morning.
If you want to try this sort of thing, get a pair of the most comfortable shoes you can find and dress very warmly. You are going to get cold anyway, but it's worth it. There's something very peaceful about looking up at the night sky. In today's crazy world, I'll take any kind of peaceful I can get. I'm looking forward to doing this again tomorrow night.
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