Welcome to the new On The Road! It’s been a long time coming, and I’m excited that we’re back.
I’m still deep in the moving/unpacking process. To explain the long time this is taking – I’m moving two houses (my mother’s and mine) into my newly-purchased home. And my house has 1.5 houses worth of stuff from our inability to throw things away combined with my mother-in-law’s stuff we inherited. So it’s not as simple as “put everything in a box” – in some cases, we have three, even four, of an item, but they aren’t together. So as we pack things or reveal things to be packed, we often have to put an item aside until we can get to the other house to group similar items.
Coincidentally, I now live right near a feature called Red Rocks.
And now onto Bill!
I’ve made a couple of trips up to Red Rock to take advantage of it’s dark skies this past month. The first trip I concentrated on the Orion nebula, a wide shot of the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies, and a wide shot of the Orion nebula complex. I was quite unhappy with the later and returned to reshoot it(with a wider 30mm lens). I also wanted to shoot a narrow shot of the Triangulum galaxy but the battery on my sky tracker ran out of juice. On the way back though Mojave the CHP had blocked off the road for a truck carrying a very long, eh, something to the Mojave Spaceport.
Technical Note: The two Orion photos have the notation “LRGB Processing”, this method of processing a photo separates the luminosity and the color in a photo and processes them separately.
Star Trails at the Red Cliffs.
When I shoot at a place with an interesting foreground, I’ll set up one camera and shoot star trails. They’re easy to shoot and due to the relative lack of air traffic at Red Rock, easy to process as well.