Last night I took the camera and tripod out in the back yard and played around with taking photographs of the Moon. Some of them came out OK. I really need to look in to buying a better telephoto lens or perhaps a decent telescope with an adapter that I can use with my Canon camera.
At any rate, I do seem to be slowly learning how to use the camera a bit better as the weeks progress.
Messing around with the camera-tripod combination reminded me a lot of my days being fascinated by the Moon and what I thought was the coming Space Age when I was a kid. I really did think that I'd live to see routine flights into Earth orbit and that people would live on the Moon and that we'd have outposts on Mars. Alas, the billionaire elite fucked us all and stole our National wealth.
I tried various ISO and F stop settings. I did manage to capture a few decent images.
These were the two best.
I was playing around with the telephoto lens on the new camera trying to figure it out and experiment with the various settings. Finally, I found a way to take some decent shots of the night sky.Yeah, now I'm looking in to buying some more powerful telephoto lenses and a more solid tripod for the camera.
The Moon, not quite full.
Some great news! Lower birth rates!
The Moon over my campsite, the night of May 31, 2009.
Da Moon.
When I was a kid, and very excited by the impending Moon missions being launched by NASA, I was fascinated by our planetary companion. I learned all that I could about it as a small child, gazing up at it in the evenings and using the
reflector telescope that my parents had bought me so that I could see the volcanic flatlands and the monstrous craters and the ragged highlands. I imagined the frail Apollo spacecraft flying to Luna and the spider-like Lunar Excursion Module touching down on the surface to deposit its crew of two.
Those were great days to be a kid interested in nature. To look up at the moon and to know that men were heading there. To read science books and understand how it was being done. To watch the news and see it happening. I'll never forget sitting in front of the television set to watch the launches of the various spacecraft as the USA painstakingly went through each step along the way. There were the Mercury shots, the Gemini missions, and then the Apollo spacecraft with the enormous Saturn V boosters.
I never forgot the feelings of pure amazement of how things worked, both in the turning of the globe, of the orbit of the Moon, of our own journey about the Sun. I would look up at the night sky and marvel at it all.
Last night, my son and I watched the total eclipse of the Moon. I've seen such events many times since I was a kid. I'd seen so many that I actually found myself missing them from time to time, despite the opportunity to witness them. But last night my son and I set up my digital camera and tripod and we took photos as the moon slowly vanished behind the enormous shadow of the Earth.And there, for a moment, I felt a little of the awe over such an event when I was just a kid. It was nice.
I tried various ISO and F stop settings. I did manage to capture a few decent images.
These were the two best.
