Tag: space

Being a Kid Again – The Magic of Spaceflight

Life, My Community, Photography, Learning

For the past two weeks, I’ve been enthralled with the broadcast of the flight of Artemis II, taking a crew of 4 astronauts for a “quick” trip out to the Moon and back over 10 days. At this time, they have safely returned to the Earth and the excitement has subsided. This crew travelled the furthest away from Earth of any humans, reaching 252,756 miles (as the crow flies). In doing so, they travelled a total of 700,237 miles around the Earth and the Moon and between them, again another record.

Over those 10 days, I relived the thrill I had as a kid when I watched the Apollo missions make their way to and onto the Moon. But there are so many differences in this half century since those flights, most of which relate to the experience we can share with the astronauts as they complete their mission.

Apollo 11 Launch
Artemis II Launch

I’m so grateful that I’ve been around to experience both sets of events. I thought it might be interesting to look at how different these two experiences were from an observer’s and photographer’s perspective.

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Space: The Final Frontier (Part 2)

astrophotography, Expertise, Photography, Tools

A few days ago, I published a single image that was the result of months of elapsed time (days of actual time) and represents the most effort I have ever put into a single photographic image. The image? The Rosette Nebula, a hydrogen gas cloud in the Milky Way Galaxy, our galaxy. These gas clouds are either stellar nurseries or the remnants of stellar explosions. Either way, they populate the sky with amazingly photogenic objects.

Rosette Nebula

These gas clouds either emit or reflect light. As such, we should be able to photograph them as we would other subjects, right? While all the photographic “rules” apply about exposure, composition, white balance, sharpness and colour saturation, they are multiplied exponentially when dealing with objects that, in this case, are a whopping 5,000 light years from us in distance.

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Space – The Final Frontier

Gear, Learning, Photography, Tools

One of my goals as a retired senior citizen is to indulge all of the interests I’ve developed over the years, now that I have the time and frankly also the money to do so.

I’ve had a long standing love affair with all things in space and space-related. By that, I mean all things off our own planet. From the early days of the Gemini and Apollo programs in the US, I’ve been gripped by a fascination around what and who could be out there. And of course, Star Trek and its offshoots only served to romanticize the idea that strange, wonderful adventures and discoveries could lie beyond our atmosphere.

I had some good fortune when younger to connect with people that worked on these challenges, at least from the point of view of humans living in space. But I’ve come to realize that humans in space is more of a challenge than we know how to solve right now, and I will never live to see permanent residence of any human anywhere other than on the Earth. But there are other ways to explore beyond our tiny speck of a planet, and I have settled on astrophotography as that method for me.

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