At night

I haven't figured out whether the air here is particuarly orange today (the low sun both early this morning and this evening was particularly warm in colour) because of what's in the air coming from the West (being Canadian forest fires) or the South (being the usual highly particulatised summer air we often import from the Eastern Seaboard of the USA). I may never know, though the jet stream *has* been mainly out of the south recently, so more probably it is the latter. One way or the other, it's man-made. This was the view from my garden a half hour or so ago.

I often rely on things like telephone poles and mailboxes to steady my camera because I am simply too lazy to carry a tripod. So the framing of my pictures is often determined, not by a sense of the shape of the picture, but by the serendipity of what the support-at-hand allows. This shot was steadied on a bench by a bus-stop while we were out walking in the drizzly weather this evening. I have cut away some of the rather boring foreground and I wish I'd got some more "head room." Oh well.

I didn't realise how many street lights had changed to the deep amber of what I expect is sodium vapour. At least not until I started taking street pictures at night. it converts well enough to black&white; this was with a bluish filter. Even with a blue filter, the light itself gets burnt out.

I've always had a soft spot in my aesthetic heart for over-processed pictures. This one is not *very* much processed -- just a little fill light (to brighten the dark trees); some white balance adjustment (to take some amber out of the foggy sky); and a little bit each of decreasing contrast and re-increasing it. And, oh yeah: turning it a bit to make up for my own lack of plumb. And a line around it all. That's not a whole lot of processing. :) This is in a neighbourhood up the hill and around a corner from ours.

All over the city, there are little bonfires in backyards like this one just below our yard. People are burning debris from the big windstorm that came through two nights ago, Hurricane Larry.

The sun had gone down a few nights ago when I saw the light in the west was pretty nice. And it seemed to match the window light in the neighbour's house.

I was hoping to see the moon, very fat tonight though not full, rising over the hill about a half kilometre away. A fog got in the way so I didn't. But one of the radio towers up there was throwing its glance around and around, lighting up the foggy bits. So I tried for it instead.

I'm not good at lotsa things that tech-savvy photographers do. Like layering photos shot with different exposures. Or dealing well with raw files. So I make do. This picture of Jupiter (L) and Saturn (R) flanking the moon started as a raw file in my camera. Then, having my in-camera jpeg, my raw file, and my jpg generated from the raw file on the computer, I looked at the Picasa-generated view of the raw and liked it best. So I did a screen shot of it. This is it.

The sky last night was opening and closing over with clouds and I was in the backyard trying to get a picture of Jupiter's moons, Luna's distant cousins. Then, through the trees, there was an opening for Luna herself. So I took her picture too.

Inspired by a friend's success, I've been trying the past two or three nights to take a picture of Jupiter's moons. Tonight, I think, I succeeded. I don't have much patience with tripods so I simply held the camera fairly tightly against a post on our back door step and aimed up through the trees. I manually focussed -- not an easy thing when you're trying to hold the camera steady with the left hand and then bring the right hand back to the body to push the shutter button. Everything else was manual too -- ISO 2000, a twentieth of a second at f/2.8. I meant it to be at the longest part of the zoom, at 150mm, but I accidentally pushed it back to 130mm. No big deal. I cropt it and, in colour, there were a lot of bad pixels. So I cloned out some and converted the whole works to b&w to reduce others. . I suppose I'll have to buy myself a telescope some time. :)

Saturday night past, the view from our back door in Ganny Cove. The amber glow is from the city lights about a hundred km away.

Tonight's view of the street: pretty cold, pretty breezy, pretty wet.

One of the fractions of the view from the back door, taken between attempts to photograph the moons of Jupiter (four visible tonight) and our own moon.

Somewhere in the world there are great Northern Lights. Hereabouts the sky's been socked in with rain, drizzle and fog. But, a few minutes ago, old Luna up there saw a break in the clouds over us and gave a blast of a show of her finery.

The moon was already over the horizon when I went outside this evening. So I walked down to the bottom of the valley and caught the moon coming over the hill there. This was about an hour ago.

This was thirty seconds, yesterday evening when the sky was dark with thick clouds but the clouds were high enough to reflect light from beyond the hill. The birds are not hungry enough yet to have eaten all the dogberries ( = American mountain ash). That time will come.

My idea of astronomy is to see what I can see with what I have. I have no telescope, so this was just my camera. And I hate digging out my tripods so I almost never use them. I just hold the camera hard against some (nearly) solid object and do what I can. This was jammed against one of the posts on our back deck. But jamming against posts ain't, uhh, "best practice." So this shot of Jupiter a couple of hours ago was shakier than it appears here. (I cloned out some shake on two of the moons.) I am starting to get an idea of how much the moons of Jupiter vary from night to night. It is good education.

Last night, about one cm into what became an 18cm snowfall and our normally thirty-minute drive home took well over an hour. But it turned fully to rain early this morning and only a thin messy cover of snow is around today.