Sorry for the long pause there. I had to get a bunch of reading done for Hugo voting! (Today is the deadline, in case you also need to submit votes.)

After I got back from Nags Head at the beginning of the month, I had two days to do some laundry and repack my suitcase to get ready to go to northern Michigan for the annual vacation Mark has been organizing with his (our) friends and family there. He thinks of it as an excuse to organize a target shooting event, but I prefer to view it as an opportunity to hang out with people in a time-warp ’50s setting. Some examples of the decor from the modest, rustic, 5 bedroom, 5 bathroom vacation house his grandparents built (you may start to notice a theme):

And one non-bird-themed item:

There are also many decorative items featuring fish, deer, and bears, but the game birds make up a safe majority. Last year, Mark and I sat in one place in the living room and tried to count all the wildlife depictions we could see without moving, and I’m pretty sure we got to over a hundred.

Time spent not marveling at the decor of the house was also spent playing board games:

Wandering the vacation towns on northern Michigan, where Heather and I found this fairy garden in a wagon parked outside a yarn shop (I forget if this was in Petoskey or Charlevoix):

And admiring the view:

Since we were above the 45th parallel, it doesn’t actually get dark until nearly 10pm, so this sunset picture was taken quite late:

This year, Mark’s friend Gene finally got to come, after having to miss last year due to having to prepare for an international art installation (such a lame excuse), and he brought his camera with the intention of trying to get some Milky Way shots. Matt, Heather, and I went along with him to the spot that he had found on the internet as likely to have some of the least light pollution. When I showed him my new camera, he said that it should be able to get some shots as well, so I took it along to try.

Gene’s pictures turned out awesome, as you can see in this example (the big glow in the middle of the trees there is a campfire), and this fantastic panorama. He also did an excellent job helping me figure out the various settings on my camera, in the dark, without the manual, but my efforts were hampered by 1) not having a tripod or any sort of stand, and 2) not being able to find the timer delay function right then. This was the least blurry one I got by just setting the camera on the little dock we were standing on and hoping for the best:

And this was what I got by setting the camera flat on dock, looking straight up:

For my very first, not very prepared efforts at night sky photography, I was pretty happy. I got the camera to do something! I would have gotten much better results with the timer, though, because all the ones where you could see the stars actually being reflected in the lake were too blury (see Gene’s pictures linked above for good examples of this).

A day or two later, when everyone else had left, I did figure out the timer function on my camera, so I went out in the driveway and took some more pictures using an improvised angled prop set on the top of Mark’s car. I got much better results from that:

The difference between taking regular photographs and attempting night sky photography was really interesting to me, particularly since I was working without a real tripod, because every shot is basically a surprise. I would position the prop, set the timer and settings on the camera, press the button, and then just wait. I never had any idea about the framing of the shot, since I was basically just setting the camera on top of the car, or what the 15-second exposure would reveal. Now, of course, I want try to get more shots! Better shots! It’s easy to see how addictive this could become. But I suspect it’s a lot harder to find places so free of light pollution now that we’re back home. I’ll have to find a light pollution map and check.