Declan's Blog

Nathan and I are heading back west from our Spring Break trip.  This involved crossing a lot of New Mexico on a very dark road – NM285.  The stars were out in force, and there was a tiny sliver of Moon accompanied by a very bright Venus.  Here’s my first 30″ shot from the moving van:

Ok, it’s silly, but turned out kinda neat.

We pulled over and I grabbed the tripod and set up for more stable shots.  Here’s my first attempt:

Hmm, what’s that shadowy crescent between Venus and the Moon?  We’d just come north from Roswell, so I figured that it was a UFO with a cloaking device.  Turns out it was my lens cover – so I screwed that off and got clearer shots:

I took a series of shorter exposures until I got that one above.

This one was a longer exposure that shows a little horizon.  The red light is a radio tower in the distance, and the slight light bloom is Albuquerque.  I bet I could do some interesting HDR stuff with these images…

I also shot some star fields at varying times and apertures.  I SO need to take a class in how to do this right.

If you go to Flickr by clicking here, you can see the whole set with all of my exposure setting experiments.  You really need to see the full sized images to get the full effect.  I think you need a free Flickr account to get the option to see full sized imaged.  Once I’m home, I’ll put them on my server as well, but Flickr is faster.

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