Photo Essay - Project 5 (Five)

For my final project, I decided to dive deep into the art of astrophotography. I've been obsessed with space ever since I was a little kid, and the idea of things being so massive millions of light years away from us is unfathomable. These massive balls of burning gas can still send us light, even from the great distance they have from us here on Earth. And every night, they shine brightly, some brighter than others. We've pieced some of them together into little pictograms, calling them "constellations" and using them to describe our unknown past. Some of these "stars" were later found to not be stars at all, but instead planets. These shine much brighter in the night sky than all the others, identifiable by their round figure and crescent shaped light. But beautiful lights aren't just from figures millions of miles away, some can appear within our atmosphere. Normally further north, the phenomenon known as "aurora borealis" has begun to creep further south as our climate changes. But regardless of the circumstances, these dancing lights are a gorgeous display of how our Earth interacts with our closest star, the Sun. Depending on its color, it can tell us just how far the rays of light have penetrated our atmosphere. With the red and green, it's not too terribly far. With the power of the camera, we can truly admire these outer-worldly displays of nature in all their saturated beauty. 

In order to take these photographs, I needed to play around with extremely high ISO levels and long exposure times. A tripod was necessary, as without it, I got very prominent light lines. Some of my star photos still had very minor light lines, as the tripod wasn't completely stable on the soft snow covered ground. It took a lot of trial and error, playing around with slightly different lengths of exposure and lower levels of ISO. I eventually settled with 10 seconds of exposure and 1600 ISO. I still had to deal with a bit of light pollution, as the moon was nearing full on this night. Luckily, on the nights where I shot photos of the aurora and of the harvest moon, the moon's light wasn't an issue. In fact, taking pictures of the moon makes the moon's light necessary! For the moon pictures specifically, I used my telescope to zoom into the face of the moon. That's how I was able to get so much detail on the photos taken, you're able to see almost every single surface mark the moon has to offer. The canyons on the surface are truly beautiful, and it's hard to imagine the overall scale of them from this far away. In fact, the valley I took a picture of is 168 miles across and 1.7 miles deep. That's a very large indent on the surface of our planet's satellite. 

Despite the terribly cold nights I spent out in the middle of nowhere taking these photos, I'm truly proud of the work I've done in Photography II this year. I hope to dip my toes further into astrophotography later on in life, but for now, it's on to bigger things. This is Madelyn, signing out.