more space shots & experiments with the night sky.

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i'm really attached to this one. positioned the moon just out of frame to create a lens flare. can you spot the andromeda galaxy? hint: it's that tiny yellow smudge in the lower left. that (relatively) small smudge is 2.5 million light years away, which means its light passed through my lens after a 2.5 million year journey. that's right about when we figured out how to use rocks as tools. literally.

 

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straight up, no flare. you can see andromeda a tad better in this one, on the far right. it looks like a star with a faint, disk-shaped glow.

 

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and finally, throwing the focus makes the big dipper even bigger. the bright yellowish one on the left is arcturus.

Effing space! Raw 30-second exposure from Canon 5D Mark II

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The galactic-center setting over the sierra mountains - as seen from our tiny speck, orbiting another brighter speck, among 200 billion other bright specks, in a wisp of gas and dust slowly swirling around a super massive black hole creating a system (our galaxy), that, in itself is one of 200 billion.

Zooming back to the first speck, this was taken at 9000 feet, from the top of Mammoth Mountain at 2:30 in the morning. I used a super-bright LED flashlight (which has a cold, more moon-like color temperature) to give the foreground just a tad more light than what the moon could provide. Wondering about the nitty gritty photo settings? 16mm wide lens at 2.8 aperture, 1600 ISO with a 30 second shutter.

I might post a post-post shot later. Ha.
For now, it's back to whatever small things we were just doing.