Paper Moon

I got a new piece of photographic equipment: a 10.5mm f/2.8 fisheye lens! Super-duper wide angle...180° view from corner to corner! It's not a zoom lens. Nikon makes a 10-24mm zoom but I wanted the faster lens for nighttime movie-making. And one of the lenses that came with the camera includes half of that range anyway.

Since it has such a wide view I thought it would be a good lens for shooting the sky. It can see a lot of the sky and can include much of the ground at the same time! So last night I put it to work.

Jerry and I went to my usual astronomy viewpoint and shot the rising of the just-past-full moon. We got set up and started shooting at 7:15. The moon made its first appearance at 7:40. It had risen a couple of minutes before that but had to rise above a bit of a hill.

I had set the exposure to get nice images of the stars against the mostly black sky. I hadn't taken pictures of the sky with a full moon so I didn't know if that exposure would be completely washed out or look nice. I couldn't tell while while pictures were being taken...I had turned off the image review to save the battery for picture taking. So after an hour and a half I decided that this was just an experiment and quit. If the moonlit portion was overexposed I didn't want to be depressed after sitting around for any longer.

It turns out that the exposure for the dark sky was great for the moonlit scene. There are still stars visible and the ground is nicely lit.

One of these days I'm going to make an all-night movie.

I shot 16 seconds long exposures with the ISO sensitivity set to 3200 and used the lens's widest aperture. There is one second between exposures.



Your videographer makes an occasional appearance. The spot is a popular place for skywatching and probably lovers' laning. So every now and then a car comes by and I stand next to the camera to keep the headlights from shining on the camera and making lens flares. But this is a wide angle lens so I got in the picture when that happened. And at times you can see Jerry or me wandering down the road.

Here's a full-sized picture I took before shooting the movie. The town on the horizon on the left is Borrego Springs. The lights in the bottom left corner are cars on Banner Grade and San Felipe Road. That part of the scene is fun to watch in the video. Of course, Orion is prominent up there in the sky.

I kept saying "I wish I were home in Kansas!" "I wish I would see meteors!" I got my wish. Once. It's on the right side of this picture below Orion.

I love my new lens!