Random Night Shots

Felt like going out and playing with the magic box the other evening. I'm not aware of any particular astronomical event, just wanted to fiddle a little with the settings on my night shots.

As you may know, I don't have a point-and-shoot camera. I committed a couple years ago to learn the art of photography and bought a DSLR, which is an acronym for one of those cameras that you can change lens.

If you have one of those you can put it on "Auto" and simply let the camera choose all the correct settings, or at least what it thinks are the right settings. But for guys like me who think they want to tinker to get the best shots you dive in and then realize you are in over your head.

The following shots are the result of an early morning shoot and the differences in coloring are due to different settings, such as aperture (amount of light through shutter) and shutter speed (how long the light stays).

The yellow in this shot (lower right) and most of the ones below is ambient light from the city.

I was astonished at the number of stars in our sky that we can't see with our eyes. This shot was taken looking straight up and about a 20 second exposure.

I put some of Shawshank in this picture for perspective.

I inadvertently got a shot of a shooting star racing across the Milky Way. On some of these shots I simply pointed the camera and pushed the remote and then just waited till I thought I'd get some a good shot. This is an extremely lucky shot - I had no idea.

My first half-ass good Milky Way shot. I don't have Photoshop so I suppose I could have juiced this up some in post processing, but this seems like a pretty nice shot all by itself.

Just by shear luck I noticed the International Space Station floating overhead and was quick enough to train the camera on its tripod over and took this shot.

The sun was coming up soon. My shooting was done but I liked this picture of the Ceridian building lit by spotlights and Venus a beacon in the sky.

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