Observatory

For this assignment it was to cover the open house at the observatory. The Star Gazing club sponsors these evenings where anybody can show up and look through the telescope, I had been to these before and really enjoyed it. The thing was now I had a camera and I had to get pictures, but let's just say you get the best star gazing when it's really dark outside but that's not quite ideal for the camera. What I ended up doing for this was waiting until the end of the evening when everybody was about to head out and asked them to stick around for a few minutes so I could get pictures. I knew I was going to have use a flash and I knew it would blind everybody to stars for a few minutes. I set the camera for a long exposure so it would catch all the cool red light that light up the observatory (red light does not kill you night vision) but I was also able to light up one of the guys with a rear curtain sync. That means on a 2 or 3 second exposure, the flash pops right at the last millisecond before the shutter closes. The shot ended up turning out pretty well even though the moon looks a bit like the sun.