Imagine, Create, Fail, Learn, Repeat

Humbling, to capture the night sky. This whole process is a work in progress for me. So much going on, I need to backtrack and break it down one piece at a time. Stars move. It is dark, but there are shadows. Focus is hard to get right on pinpoint bits or light millions and millions of miles away. ISO, Aperture, tracking, alignment – so many moving pieces.

So much wrong, but so good to get out and give this a try. Couldn’t sleep last night, so I grabbed the camera and gear and went off to one of 2 sites I had in mind. Didn’t like #1 and went to this alternate. Not ideal, the core was behind the ridge, but relatively dark.

Tracking, panorama, changing light, moving stars, hard to process, and I saw a bear.

The color all over – light pollution, and then by the time I shot the last panel the sky was changing over to blue. Processed by the seat of my pants just to get it done and out of my system, so I can learn and move on to the next one.

The foreground is a blur as I was tracking and did not have time to shoot a static foreground – sky changed, I needed to get home to prep kids for school, and I was frozen.

Canon M6 with EF-M 22 on Vixen Polarie tracker, lined up via compass and through the eye hole.

90s exposures, 4 in each position hoping to stack them – but I haven’t done that yet.

I should have stepped down to 2.8 from 2.5 to control distortion at the edges of the lens. Next time.

And, next time I’ll use the RRS pano / nodal setup to make overlap and alignment easier. Eyeball overlap in the dark is really hard to get right – lots of wasted pixels this morning.

Imagine, create, fail, learn, repeat.

Its not a great astro image, but its mine, and it is another stepping stone.