Getting Back Out There; Honing My Astro Skills

After a hiatus from doing much shooting for a number of months in the midst of the pandemic lockdown, I have had the ability over the last several months to get back out into nature and resume shooting the landscape.

A particular theme lately has been my efforts to hone my skills in astrophotography, spurred on by some rare astronomical phenomena that have been taking place in recent months. The first of these was the annular solar eclipse that took place at the end of June - I was originally planning a trip to photograph this event from East Asia (Taiwan specifically) but due to the pandemic was not able to make this plan a reality. So, no annular eclipse shots this year…. hopefully I can catch one of the next of these events!

Otherwise, I have been working a lot on shooting the Milky Way - some of these efforts have turned out well, and I have added a number of Milky Way shots and composite images to my site. My composite of the Milky Way over the Pyramid of Kulkulcan in Chichen Itza has been my most popular Instagram post to date.

In addition, I spent two weekends attempting to shoot the comet NEOWISE, which passed within 70,000 miles of Earth in late July - early August. I came away with a few images of the comet, including another nice composite of the comet over the Assateague Lighthouse. The best shot from that weekend, however, turned out to be my image of Venus rising over the Chincoteague wetlands (“The Morning Star”). Well worth the dozens of mosquito bites - but lesson learned - BRING BETTER BUG SPRAY OR WEAR A MOSQUITO NET. Better yet, try and avoid this area in the Summertime. I think my next trip there will be in the late Winter or early Spring.

Most recently, I have been hoping to shoot the ongoing Perseid meteor shower, but conditions in my area have not been helpful - heavy cloud cover and rainy weather have prevented me from going out to shoot this event, although I am holding out hope that I can still catch some of it in the coming days.

Overall, it has been a good few months of photography, and I have come away with some portfolio images that I am very pleased with. I have updated my website here with many of these new images, and added a number of them to my store as well.

-GB