in your multitudes
scarce to be counted
filling the darkness
with order and light
you are the sentinels
silent and sure
keeping watch in the night.
One of the not quite smaller joys of our trips to the beach is that more of the night sky is visible from the deck of whichever house we've rented for the week than we could possibly see at home. It's hardly perfect there either, you can't really make out the Milky Way with the naked eye, but better is still, actually, better. While we were there I downloaded the Night Sky app to help make sense of what I was looking at. What I originally supposed to be Mars was, infact, its opposite (literally - it was Antares). I learned to be able to identify the constellations that dominated the southern sky which our house was facing - mostly Scorpius and Sagittarius.
Considering Idalia (rated a tropical storm by the time she passed to our near south) came through during the middle of the week, we had remarkably good weather for appreciating the night sky. The night of the storm, Wednesday, was really the only night that was entirely a wash - the skies were mostly clear and the moon was mostly full all the other nights.
Full moons pose a challenge of their own, of course. They are sneakily brighter than we realize and so you can really only expose for the moon or the stars and landscape, but not both. I took some exposed for just the moon at f/11 at 1/160-1/25s. Those for the stars were at f/1.4 at 1-5s - that's about 15 stops of difference (32,000 times the light) between the far ends of those ranges. By the time I get enough light to shoot the stars, the moon looks like the sun - a blinding bright spot that washes out everything around it.
I'm no astrophotographer, but playing around for it for the week with mildly favorable conditions has me appreciating the appeal.
