August 21, 2019

Another new moon and another trip to Joshua Tree. This time I stopped in Redlands along the way to take some IR pics of the University of Redlands. I got back on the freeway and headed east to Joshua Tree. I arrived before my colleague and got some good sunset shots. We decided to shoot at a place called Belle Campground which is about a mile north of Arch Rock. We didn't realize until we got to the campground entrance that they're closed in the summer months(it's really hot) so we walked in from the locked gate. There were a couple of rocks with a nice gap, so while we were waiting for it to get dark enough for Milky Way shots, I shot the twilight between the rocks. Once it got dark enough, I shot star trails above the rocks with the gap and started taking Milky Way pictures with a large rock as a foreground. Unfortunately I didn't reset my lens to a wider aperture from when I was shooting the twilight pictures so my Milky Way pictures didn't turn out(it's a manual lens that has no feedback to the camera indicating f-stop). I switched to my telephoto lens to get some shots of the Lagoon Nebula and M31. I was having trouble sighting Polaris until I saw a airplane passing by it and then could ID Polaris on the sighting scope for my star tracker. Even with the messed up Milky Way shot it was a productive trip.

Thanks to Alain for providing this thread to post some of my pictures and thank you for your kind comments. Farewell.

5 / 5

M31

After shooting Lagoon(I was shooting the star trails with my Galaxy NX camera while I was shooting the Milky Way fail and Lagoon with my NX1), I turned my attention to shooting the Andromeda Galaxy(M31). I shot M31 on my last trip to Joshua Tree and wanted to make another attempt using more exposures(I shot 30, 30 second exposures last month; this time I was going to shoot 60, 30 second exposure for a total of 30 minutes). The problem I rean into was finding the galaxy with my camera. What I ended up doing was putting a 16-50mm lens on the camera and locating the galaxy that way and centering it. Then zoomed to 50mm and centering it. Finally I put on the 50-200mm lens and centered it(I think I done good). When I returned home I stacked the multiple exposures using Sequator and did the final processing on Photoshop. I'm pretty happy with this image, you can see the spiral arms and dust lanes pretty clearly.