July 17, 2019
The Starman Returns(Part II)...
So where did I leave y'all in the last installment? Ah yes, by Arch Rock out in Joshua Tree. Well after I shot my Milky Way Pics I did a bit of light pinting to the loud chorus of Light! by the cockroachs, eh I mean photographers on the ledge. So I re-setup down by some rocks below the arch, which was fine until the guys screeming Light! a few minutes earlier started down though my shot with bright headlamps. After they left, myself and my collegue repositioned ourselves a bit further back, while the new folk up on the ledge crawled to the lower part of the arch to do light painting, ugh. We headed back to the Ryan Mountain Trailhead and noticed some nice rocks along sice of the road near Jumbo Rocks Campground. After getting a shot there, it was on to the parking by the trailhead to get my car for one more location that I had in mind. We ended up stopping a bit short of the location I had planned and finished our shots at Intersection Rock.
Read MoreSo where did I leave y'all in the last installment? Ah yes, by Arch Rock out in Joshua Tree. Well after I shot my Milky Way Pics I did a bit of light pinting to the loud chorus of Light! by the cockroachs, eh I mean photographers on the ledge. So I re-setup down by some rocks below the arch, which was fine until the guys screeming Light! a few minutes earlier started down though my shot with bright headlamps. After they left, myself and my collegue repositioned ourselves a bit further back, while the new folk up on the ledge crawled to the lower part of the arch to do light painting, ugh. We headed back to the Ryan Mountain Trailhead and noticed some nice rocks along sice of the road near Jumbo Rocks Campground. After getting a shot there, it was on to the parking by the trailhead to get my car for one more location that I had in mind. We ended up stopping a bit short of the location I had planned and finished our shots at Intersection Rock.
Not the Milky Way.
I was shooting a set of final shots with my new Galaxy Camera so I got out the star tracker, set it up and pointed the NX1 at the Andromeda Galaxy(M31). M31 is our closest galactic neighbor(and fellow jackal). You can see it's two satelite galaxies M32 just to the right and below the galactic center and M110 above and slightly left of the galactic center. When I looked at the shots on my camera they looked a bit out of focus, but once I stacked them the shots seemed to work. This is 20 shots @ 30 seconds. I've added the diffraction spikes in post. I think if I shot 40 or 60 shots the plane of stars in the disk would have larger, but I'm pretty happy with this effort.
