chasing eclipses
More astronomy-related photography coming up this weekend! (and it’s moon-related, again)
I’ll be in Utah’s Bryce Canyon National Park to photograph the May 20th annular eclipse, when the Moon will block out most of the Sun. From good ol’ Wikipedia:
An annular solar eclipse occurs when the Moon’s apparent diameter is smaller than the Sun, causing the Sun to look like an annulus (ring), blocking most of the Sun’s light. An annular eclipse appears as a partial eclipse over a region thousands of kilometres wide.
Bryce Canyon is normally already one of my favorite places to photograph, so throwing in an eclipse just makes it better. Hopefully I’ll get some good shots with the ringed Sun in the background of Bryce Canyon. (and being a Tumblr whore, I measure the quality of photographs by the number of notes I get. Kind of. Not really)
Source: whatshouldbetchescallme
This is why I was out of town this weekend!
A moonbow is the phenomenon in which hundreds of photographers from across the world will gather in a few hundred square feet of Yosemite National Park to photograph something that they can’t actually see with their naked eyes, in the hopes of getting a lunar rainbow to show up on film memory card.
It was pretty crazy out there - a few photo magazines had run articles on moonbows, and one of the old seasoned photographers I was chatting with said that this was by far the most photographers he’s seen shooting moonbows. It didn’t help when a tour bus dumped off a few dozen European tourists…
(with these longer exposures, it’s actually not immediately clear that the photos are taken at night - until you see the Big Dipper in the sky)
Reblog this if it’s okay to vent to you.
(via chitpickle)
Source: 0rbiting
Q:Are you going to prom?
Anonymous
Yes! :)
chasing moonbows
(or, why I’ll be frolicking in Yosemite this weekend instead of studying for APs)
Rainbows are wonderful things. Especially double rainbows across the sky. That 42° refracted light is pretty sexy.
And they’re even cooler at night. Or so I’ve heard.
The optical phenomenon of a rainbow at night is called a moonbow, and thanks to the calculations of some friendly Texas astronomers, I know that the Moon will be near lunar perigee and the moonbows should be quite bright this weekend.
If the weather cooperates, that is. If it’s nice and cloudless, then hopefully I’ll capture some nice images of these moonbows at Upper and Lower Yosemite Falls. And if the weather is nasty - well, then it’ll be a nice break from AP tests. I actually have loads of AP Physics to review/learn, but yolo.
greek goddesses
- Me on the MIT Facebook page: IT'S MAY 1 WE GET OUR ATHENA ACCOUNTS TOMORROW
- Fellow prefrosh: AHHHHHHHH SO EXCITED
- People in real life: what
- Me in 4 months: wow I was so lame back then getting excited over a new email address
blast from the past
You know how looking into a telescope is like looking into the past because light from distant galaxies takes forever to reach the Earth? My room is kind of like that. So much of my past is preserved in there. You can see the various obsessions I had at various ages, all frozen in time.
My bookshelves have all the old books I loved so much as a child - Artemis Fowl, Harry Potter, The Tale of Despereaux, Guardians of Ga’Hoole (the barn owl was my favorite animal for so long). My ceiling still has those glow-in-the-dark stars that I taped vaguely in the shape of the Big Dipper when I was eight. A Lego space shuttle exists somewhere in the primordial mess under my bed, probably in several pieces. So does that giant foam 3-D puzzle of the Saturn V rocket that I got for Christmas when I was around nine.
(Yeah, I liked space and astronomy a lot when I was a kid. Blame my dad for taking me to all those star parties. Actually, I still like space a lot. Zakir, when are we doing that joint mission to Europa where Lowell builds the spaceship, you do the physicky magic, and I collect the biological specimens/pull a hack that ends up ruining the mission?)
On an vaguely related astronomical note, I’ll probably be using up one of the precious few absences I have left to see the May 20th annular eclipse up in NorCal. Combined with the day I’ll miss to shoot moonbows in Yosemite next week, I only have 2 absences left for the rest of the semester…eek.
