I've been busy .......

[ERD50]

Do a search for Illinois dark sky and you might find some place not too far to drive.

Thanks!

Google to the rescue. Dixon or Braidwood are within a couple hours. Once I get some practice on technique, maybe I'll plan a little trip. Cloud cover tonight, so no such luck.

heh-heh, gotta love their description of Braidwood:

How are the sky conditions? The site is 55 miles from downtown Chicago as the crow flies, so the sky conditions are remarkably good for being this close to the suburban sprawl. Chicago is northeast, so there is some sky glow in that direction. Also the Braidwood nuclear power station is in the north, so it provides some glow too. That the glow in the north and northeast tapers off at about 40 degrees. However, all other directions are dark.

-ERD50

 

[audreyh1]

Most of my photography is done facing south or southeast during the summer. If you get the aurora borealis you might want to point north - I don't know much about it.

This is what got me started - http://www.photographyblogger.net/how-to-photograph-the-milky-way/

 

[photoguy]

Thanks for sharing the pictures. Very cool

Although I do a lot of long exposure photos (not super long but usually between 5-30s), I haven't done any star photography and your pics make me want to try.

 

[Dreamer]

Nice. I need to go somewhere to see the stars again!

 

[Badger]

Beautiful pictures. Takes me back to the 70's when I used to load up the VW van and travel out to the south west camping during the summer. So many stars when there are no city lights to wash them out.

Cheers!

 

[aim-high]

Beautiful! Thanks for sharing it. Things like this make me think . . . "is it worth it working an extra year or two?"

 

[donheff]

Wow, makes me want to drag out a tripod and try some night long exposures at my weekend house. I don't think I can get anything like that. Was the Milky Way so dramatic to the eye or did the time exposure bring it out?

 

[audreyh1]

Wow, makes me want to drag out a tripod and try some night long exposures at my weekend house. I don't think I can get anything like that. Was the Milky Way so dramatic to the eye or did the time exposure bring it out?

The camera sees far more than the eye, which makes this photography very exciting. A whole new scene is "revealed" when you see the exposed image of what is in front of you.

In the above examples, the sky still had some blue, and you could make out lots of details with the naked eye in the Milky Way - the Ptolemy cluster, even the Lagoon Nebula. But the Milky Way appears much more black and white. You vaguely see some colors on the foreground from the moon, but barely. I think at lower light levels, the black-and-white sensors in the human eye take over. That's certainly true later when the moon has set and the sky is darker. You see lots of details, tons of stars, the Milky Way clearly stretches across the entire sky, but it's pretty much a black and white view. The camera also sees far more stars than the human eye.

 

[Midpack]

Google to the rescue. Dixon or Braidwood are within a couple hours. Once I get some practice on technique, maybe I'll plan a little trip. Cloud cover tonight, so no such luck.

If you have access to a boat on Lake Michigan, you can see stars much better out on the lake once you get away from shore (less than a couple hours)...

 

[dvalley]

Audrey, I was starting to read this thread from 2006 (http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f29/how-do-did-you-prepare-for-er-20952.html) in which you posted about retiring back in 1999! So the curiosity got the best of me and I thought to take a look and see if you're still active on this board and how your early retirement has been treating you...sure enough you seem like you're still enjoying it! aweome! I love to see these types of success stories

 

[HFWR]

300mm, f/11, 1/100

From where I live, you'd think there were only a couple hundred stars in the sky. But the moon is plenty bright...

 

[Ronstar]

Great shots! I hope to someday take some decent photos. I'm breaking in photography as a new hobby, looking to get a DSLR in the next week or so. I need something to do with the extra spare time I'll have in the winter

 

[FIREd]

From where I live, you'd think there were only a couple hundred stars in the sky. But the moon is plenty bright...

I can't see many stars either where I live. But I can capture a few bright ones that I can't otherwise see with the naked eye when using long exposures like on this shot of downtown (the stars are hard to see on this 800x600 pic, but they are very visible on the larger pic taken on a night when the sky appeared particularly dark):

Got this picture of an almost-full moon a few months ago while playing with the settings on my new camera:

 

[Dawg52]

Nice pictures.

I bought a Nikon DSLR camera soon after I retired but never put enough time into it to really get the most out of my camera. My lazy side bled through. But I am tapering back a bit on golf and with the end to home projects in sight, I may have to get back into it.

 

[Nodak]

Very nice pics. I've been trying some night sky photography for awhile now and am thinking about buying a tracking camera drive. The Orion 8975 StarBlast AutoTracker Altazimuth Mount is the one I am looking at. It's $200 from Amazon. Haven't convinced myself yet that it's worth it though.