Shooting the stars
As far as photography is concerned, astrophotography is a bit odd. It’s not like the heavens haven’t been images thousands of times, and often by people with equipment that far exceeds my own meagre means.
But people do continue to take shots of the sky at night. Look at this shot of the Milky Way featuring the Southern Cross, taken from my backyard one cool Autumn evening:
I took this with a Nikon d70s with a 30 second exposure. Later, I took another shot, this time with a 200 second exposure. Since I didn’t have a tripod that could track the sky’s movement, there’s some blurring of the stars here.
But you still get the idea. Now you can see the Coal Sack and the dust really clearly. So it was cold, and I had to hold the shutter button, and the result is a photo that I could easily have grabbed from the Internet. Have a look at Greg Bock’s photos, for instance. Better than mine, but basically the same thing.
So why do I still want to go out and take more photos? Partly it’s the technical challenge, for sure. But it’s also the sense you get that you have somehow captured a part of the universe – maybe hat you’ve seen that little bit further than you might otherwise have seen. There’s also a sense of tangibility for me. A photo in a book or on the ‘Net is beautiful, and may be technially superior to y attempts above, but to me my photos are more real simply because I took them.
