The
House
of Ding.

The night sky

• Posted August 24th, 2009
• by Chris
• 2 comments

It’s been so long since I stared for hours at a starry sky and real­ized how truly insignif­i­cant we are. The light pol­lu­tion and dis­trac­tions of the city make it dif­fi­cult to appre­ci­ate what’s up there. This past week­end ‘Nes, some friends and I made a trip up to my family’s cabin to do just that—stare at the sky.

The weather was per­fectly clear and unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally calm and I got the chance to take some long expo­sures of the stars (I’ve been want­ing to do that for so long!). A few actu­ally turned out decent:

Fac­ing south; Milky Way vis­i­ble through the cen­ter of the sky

South again at a wider-angle; Jupiter is that bright spot above the cabin

Look­ing north over Lake Tra­verse; light pol­lu­tion from a small town

We spent a lot of time look­ing through Jeff’s tele­scope and imagers (I’m really fight­ing the urge to go out an buy one!). It was so dark and clear the Alex was even able to pick out the Androm­eda galaxy with his naked eye. I really hope to return soon and do some more exploring.

Pho­tos in this post © Chris­t­ian Dinger—all rights reserved.