La Palma holds a festival of astronomy, Astrofest, with activities for all ages and knowledge levels. One of the highlights is “The big turn off” (El apagón) where town halls turn off the street lights for an hour so that the stars are visible. The Island Council provides amateur telescopes and starlight guides to each municipality. I used to really enjoy being one of the starlight guides. The closing ceremony for…
As the car leaves home, say, “Oh, I forgot the tripod, but it’s OK, I can use the car roof.” Drive to the other side of the island, so you can see the sunset. Say airily, “If we go a bit lower, I’m sure we can get below the clouds. When you get lower, find a spot without many streetlights and point optimistically at the gap between the cloud base…
I woke up early and went out onto the balcony to see whether or not it was cloudy. As you can see, there certainly were clouds, just not in front of the planets. It’s really hard to fetch a camera bag and a tripod when you need a walker. It’s even harder to set up the tripod when you have to sit down to do it, and hardest of all…
I finally got to see the comet! The plan was to go to El Llano del Jable, but I found cars parked solidly along the roadside for a kilometre or more before the viewpoint itself, so I settled for what I could get. Unfotunately I’d had to leave in a hurry and I found that I’d brought the wrong tripod. This one wouldn’t connect with the camera, so I wedged…
I had a go photographing myself with stars. The trick is to have a long exposure for the stars (in this case, ISO 3200, 15 seconds, f4) plus a flash photo for me (or anything else you’d like in the foreground.) I set the flash to half power. If the person moves before the 20 seconds have finished, you might get stars and/or the horizon showing through. I want to…
It’s a funny thing, but the photos look very different on the desktop computer to the laptop – I hope this looks reasonable on your computer or phone.. You can only ever see the zodiacal light in really dark places, in the east about an hour before dawn, or in the west an hour after sunset. I took this photo from my balcony. It’s caused by dust in the plane…