Perigee Lunar Eclipse - September 27, 2015

Michigan State Capitol Dome Scaffolding At Night

Jupiter, The Moon, & The Capitol

Thursday night, I took a few photos of the Capitol with the Moon and one of a very tiny Jupiter right above the peak of the dome (see above).  While it is not very bright, Jupiter still outshone any of the stars due to the city's light pollution.  It looked so small and insignificant in the sky even though Jupiter is 11 times the size of the Earth.  This got me thinking about the scale of Jupiter, the Earth, and the Moon using the Capitol for a frame of reference.  After some research and rough calculations, I came up with this graphic at the very bottom that tries to put these sizes into context, though the sizes are still hard to grasp!

Michigan Capitol Christmas Tree

CN Tower Night & Day

The most iconic feature of the Toronto skyline is the CN Tower.  Our hotel had a nice view of the tower, though I had to figure a secure way to hold my camera out the very small window to get clear photographs of it without dropping the camera.  We went up in the tower one night, but I think I would recommend a daylight trip to anyone wishing to visit it.  The lights used to light the tower cause a lot of reflections on the glass and make it difficult to get good photos.  I also captured a few daytime shots of the skyline from different locations, showing the tower as the focal point on the horizon.

Lunar Eclipse

I arose early this morning and hauled my gear down to a local parking garage in order to get a clear shot of the Moon as it experienced a full eclipse.  I had to fight some wind gusts that made the longer exposures needed for this kind of photography trickier.  When the Moon is full and bright, a relatively fast exposure still works.  However, it kept getting darker and darker, requiring several shutter speed changes.  The longer the shutter remains open, the chances you will have a blurred shot increase.  I aligned all these photos so that the Moon is about the same size and position in the frame to give you an idea of the Earth's encroaching shadow.  The very bottom photo is a compilation of several shots throughout the morning in one photo.

Almost Full Moon

The nearly full Moon created some interesting photos last weekend at the cabin.  The photograph above is the light of the Moon shining through the smoke of our campfire.  The photograph below is of the Moon lighting up the trees and the clouds streaking in front of it.  Even though it was only two-thirds full, the Moon lit up everything in this area free of light pollution.

Late Summer Star Trails

Milky Way & Moon Movement

Aside from the very short time of really dark skies around the summer solstice when the nights are very brief at higher latitudes, our cabin in the Upper Peninsula has proven to be a great place to take star photos.  It has no light pollution from nearby cities and the Sun and Moon are the only things that cause any real light pollution issues.  This weekend, I had essentially three hours of skies that were dark enough to capture good photographs, as the sunset on the horizon still glowed at midnight and by 3:30am enough sunrise light overexposed my frames to the point that even the dark trees were burnt out of the photos.  Later in the summer and autumn, I should be able to capture some more impressive shots.

The photo above is of the Milky Way rising on the eastern horizon.  You can see a satellite streaking across the right side of the photo.  I stacked about 100 photos shot over a 2-hour period to create the star trail photo below.  I really like this picture because you can see both the upward arc of the stars above the equator and the slight downward arc of those below the equator.

I composed the first video below from the same photos that I used for the star trail photo.  You can see the movement of the Milky Way across the night sky.  The second video shows the movement of the Moon across the sky.  I used my 500mm lens to capture 3 minutes of video, which I sped up to about 30 seconds so that you can see the movement quicker.  Both videos show how fast the Earth spins in a short period of time, motion that seems imperceptible to the naked eye.

Chicago Water Tower

The Wrigley Building - Day & Night

Art On Congress Parkway

On our drive into Chicago the other night, we traversed Congress Parkway for several blocks.  While not a huge fan of abstract artwork, the brightly lit metal sculpture panels along the street caught my eye.  I went back later to shoot some pictures of these panels and their ever-changing colors.  I also captured the light of one of the panels on a bare tree that made a cool photo.  And I happened upon a unique critter on one of the building walls! 

 

Snowy Chicago Street

This photograph was a complete accident the other night while I was wandering the streets of Chicago.  It is actually three photos merged together.  I had stopped at an intersection near the "L" to reset the aperture on my lens after taking some long exposures a few blocks back.  The camera was on its tripod, so the three photos were framed the same, just a little lighter each photo.  The snow was starting to fall and you can see some of the flakes illuminated by the streetlight and streaking across the photo as the wind tossed them around.  I never intended to keep the photos, but I stacked them on a whim when I got home and came up with this picture that I kind of like.

Black & White Monuments

On our trip to Williamsburg this week, Valerie and I made a quick detour through downtown Washington, D.C.  We only had a few hours, but we walked from one end of the Mall to the other stopping to photograph a few of them monuments along the way.  Pictured here are the Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, and part of the World War II Memorial.  I took these in color with the intention of converting them to black and white when I had the opportunity, as I think the nearly monochrome world of the monuments look best in black and white.