Tonight, at the Texas Astronomical Society's Earth Hour star party, I had the opportunity to photograph the beautiful crescent moon through a telescope. But alas, my camera was nowhere to be found, no matter how much I dug around in my purse. Much later, on the way home, I realized that it had been sitting on the front seat of my car the whole time. I'd taken it out of my purse as I approached the star party to take this outstanding photo.
Clearly, it is a much better shot than the detailed one that I could have had of the moon's sidelit craters. Don't worry though; I was at least able to take a high-quality night shot with my phone of a star party volunteer showing cool live footage of the Orion Nebula on a projection screen. :P
Let me just say that despite the photographic tragedy, I had a really great time tonight. The TAS members there were all super nice and eager to share their wealths of knowledge. One professional astronomer even gave me a long, fascinating lesson on the use of spectroscopy to detect which chemical elements are present in an object in space.. but I won't pretend that I understand it well enough to explain it here. ;)
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5 comments:
It's always the same isn't it: you see something beautiful and your camera is nowhere to be found. And in the case of the car walking the dog: I had my camera, but didn't want to stop (on a deserted road no less...).
Oh, that's something I would do, and I'd be kicking myself so hard! I'm glad you had a good time anyway - I've often found that having a camera with me can interfere with my enjoyment of the events, oddly enough, because I'm concentrating so hard on getting pictures, that I forget to be 'in the moment'.
Maybe it was for the best!
Mara, I do the same thing sometimes. I'll even say to myself, "I should take a picture of that," but then I don't. I was going to say, why is that? But:
Jay, I think you've nailed it. Sometimes it's so hard to be a part of the moment when you're behind a camera. Just after we graduated college, one of my friends who was a graphic design major and a photographer came on our post-Katrina "hurricane relief" trip to New Orleans without a camera. She said it was a completely different two weeks than the one she would normally have had in that situation. I do think about that sometimes..
Oh I bet you understood exactly how spectroscopy is used, you are just too modest.
Your photos are...uhm.....interesting to say the least ;-)
hehe, Carolina, it was one of those times where everything he said made sense to me as he said it, but I couldn't put it all together after the explanation to make sense again ;)
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