star party

At the McDonald observatory, Fort Davis, Tx. Shot with moonlight and the red safety lights they use, to help preserve your night vision. The observatory does a few tours and star viewing sessions a week. I was really impressed by how good their presentations were and how well they explained things. Learned a few ideas that really helped through the whole week. Also got to see Saturn through a big telescope - could see the rings really clearly and a couple of the moons. It was almost a full moon last week, hence all the bright moonlight in this shot, shining off all 3 domes. Was also great for actually viewing the moon directly.

I've done the first pass on the images I took last week, cut away about 75% of the shots so far, down to a final selection of close to 500. There are quite a few potential HDR shots in there, maybe 100 or so frames to be combined as and when I work out a workflow for doing them. Getting there slowly.