Taking Advantage of Vantage Rocks

When Kyra was pregnant with Andrew, I scheduled a Manshower which became known as the "shitty backpack."  It was a four day trip to the Three Sisters Wilderness just outside Bend, OR and served as my first real introduction to astrophogography.  The infamous Jack was along for the trip and was the one who gave me my first (and pretty much all subsequent) astrophotography lessons.

Apparently I STARTED a blog about the "shitty backpack" but didn't finish/post it, you know, the whole had a baby and moved since thing (ugh, how long can I use that as an excuse?). Que Sera Sera. While I go back and review said blog you can read Jack's version of events to get familiar with it.

My First Time
If this was /r/Gonewild, it would look MUCH different

When we found out that Jack's wife was pregnant, we immediately started planning his Manshower. We started with grand ideas of flying to Fairbanks to get Aurora pictures, traveling to the desert Southwest to get Milky Way pictures, and even briefly thought of leaving the United States.  But alas, time and money were not on our side so we opted to spend an evening at Vantage Rocks in eastern Washington (otherwise known as Frenchman Coulee).

Jack had recently purchased a star tracker, and I tried making my own (a la this method) and we were both looking forward to trying out our purchase/creation.  Alas, none of it worked for either of us, it turns out that polar alignment is hard, even with a polar alignment scope (Jack) and nearly impossible without one (me).

I did however figure out that if I ran my tracker "backwards" that I would get really cool star trails in a very short period of time as you will see below.

As are most of my star trips, this one was another learning experience.  Things learned:
1) Star trackers are hard to set up and get right.
2a) High ISO produces lots of noise
2b) You need high ISO to do any star pics at greater than 50mm
2c) Therefore, any "zoom" pics are noisy as hell
2d) For some reason the "median" stack method for fixing noise isn't working. . .I'll keep trying
3) The solution is a star tracker, but
3a) They are expensive (well for someone who just purchased a house and just had a baby they are)
3b) Making them is fun, but I don't know if I did it correctly


Enough is enough: Here are some pictures.

This was not taken by reversing my star-tracker.  This was an old-fashioned "snap and stack".  I can't recall the number of exposures, but it was a stack of several 4 minute exposures, each at 200 ISO over the course of about 90 minutes.  After that was done I lit up the foreground using a headlamp and a light diffuser.  The foreground is a composite of about 6 shots, about 30 seconds each, also at ISO 200.  For each shot I stood in a slightly different spot to illuminate a different side of the rocks.

After initially processing this I discovered a nifty way to process star trails that gets rid of gaps so that it looks much smoother.  For comparison sake, I'm posting both shots and labeling them.  I ended up having to process them differently so they came out quite different.  Which one do you like more?  Which aspects of which one do you like and which aspects of which one do you NOT like?  Let me know in the comments.

Vantage Star Trails - no gap fix.

Vantage Star Trails - Gap Fix
(I also processed it differently)

We played around the pillars for a while, spending more time than we should trying to take a climbing picture (must try again, it WILL be really cool).  Jack managed to get a few additional decent shots from here, but I wasn't able to.  I was playing with the 70-200 lens and had to crank up the ISO to high and couldn't correct for it in post.

At one point I couldn't find Jack, so I was alone, in the middle of nowhere, and it was just then that the coyotes decided to start crying. . .I may, or may not, have been a bit jumpy.

After a while we drove a ways and hopped out of the car to go for a little hike.  It was around a mile before we found a nice place from which to hopefully get some Milky Way shots.  It started to cloud over, we were getting some light pollution (apparently we hiked to right next to I-90) and I was getting a bit bored so I was goofing off a bit, but got one decent shot.

See, one decent shot

GOD OF WAR (back to goofing off)

Remember me mentioning a star tracker at the beginning?  Remember me mentioning that it didn't work very well because I couldn't figure out how to do proper polar alignment.  Well, this is what happens if you turn the thing on BACKWARDS and run it for 5 minutes.  Yep, that's me, standing on the top of the ridge.  I stood there for the entire exposure, then about 10-15 seconds before the shutter closed I turned on the light up Frisbee, did some sort of Ninja moves then tossed the thing toward the camera.  Between quick star-trails and the UFO look, the effect is pretty cool with the combination .  I'm sure I will find a good use for this in the future.  

Space(d) Invader!!!

Well, that's it for this episode.  I DID go to Las Vegas / Death Valley (well, near it) last week.  I'm done processing those pictures and should have the blog post written in the next few days. In the mean-time, I forgot to share one of my favorite pictures from our December trip to Idaho Falls.  Enjoy!

Christmas Lights
(Apparently this is a memorial which means it may be on all year.  I am heading to Idaho Falls in July and if this is still lit up I will try doing something fun.)