On the Road and In Your Backyard

Good Morning All,

This weekday feature is for Juicers who are are on the road, traveling, or just want to share a little bit of their world via stories and pictures. So many of us rise each morning, eager for something beautiful, inspiring, amazing, subtle, of note, and our community delivers – a view into their world, whether they’re far away or close to home – pictures with a story, with context, with meaning, sometimes just beauty. By concentrating travel updates and tips here, it’s easier for all of us to keep up or find them later.

So please, speak up and share some of your adventures and travel news here, and submit your pictures using our speedy, secure form. You can submit up to 7 pictures at a time, with an overall description and one for each picture.

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For each picture, it’s best to provide your commenter screenname, description, where it was taken, and date. It’s tough to keep everyone’s email address and screenname straight, so don’t assume that I remember it “from last time”. More and more, the first photo before the fold will be from a commenter, so making it easy to locate the screenname when I’ve found a compelling photo is crucial.

Have a wonderful day, and enjoy the pictures!

 

Today, pictures from valued commenter ?BillinGlendaleCA.

The Return of the Milky Way

As the new moon approaches the opportunities to be able to see the Milky Way at dark locations lends itself again. This month weather constrained the choices of where to shoot; not the record setting heat, but cloudy skies. Since the kid is headed to Australia and New Zealand in late September and will be taking pics in dark sky locations, I insisted that she learn a bit about shooting in that environment. I had two locations selected for shooting: a familiar location(Red Rock) and new place(Arroyo Hondo, about 25 miles west of Santa Barbara). Both locations afforded dark skies and were about the same distance from BillinGlendale.com HQ. We ended up going(with Madame) to Red Rock due to a fire near Santa Barbara and my concern that the smoke might cause problems with shooting. We arrived early enough to still have some daylight to shoot some foreground shots and have some dinner. The skies where a bit cloudy in the beginning but cleared to allow for some pretty nice shots. With the fire near Santa Barbara(Goleta) out, I twice headed up to Arroyo Hondo later in the week to try shooting up there.

Red Rock cliffs.

Taken on 2018-07-07

Red Rock State Park, Cantil CA

Hey, that’s not a Milky Way pic! No, that is what was behind us while we were shooting the Milky Way at Red Rock.

Mars rising.

Taken on 2018-07-07

Red Rock State Park, Cantil CA

One of the things I decided to do, since I was not shooting alone was to not use the sky tracker. Instead I was shooting 8 shots and then using Photoshop to reduces noise with a a technique called stack averaging. The problem with this shot is that Mars was rising while I took the 8 shots and was not visible in the first few shots and got averaged out. I added it back in from the final shot, along with the meteor and the car headlights in the foreground. The foreground was shot while we still had some daylight and darkened.

Portrait shot.

Taken on 2018-07-07

Red Rock State Park, Cantil CA

In addition to helping the kid learn to shoot the Milky Way, I was shooting with a new camera(my old camera’s big brother, the NX1) and a new lens with a slightly smaller field of view(16mm, instead of 12mm); so I wanted to test out my new tools.

Galactic Center

Taken on 2018-07-13

Arroyo Hondo, Gaviota, CA

This is a shot of Mars and the Galactic Center, this was more of a test of the camera/lens combination to see what kind of color I could get. The lights at the bottom are offshore oil platforms and they do contribute a bit of light pollution to the otherwise dark southern skies.

Portrait shot of the Galactic Center

Taken on 2018-07-13

Arroyo Hondo, Gaviota, CA

Same shot as above but in portrait orientation. The one other problem that I discover with Arroyo Hondo is that truckers like the vista point as a place to pull of the road and rest a bit, so the foreground we suddenly get some un-welcomed illumination. I do like how this shot looks like the Milky Way is being illuminated by the offshore oil platform.

The Milky Way(fisheye).

Taken on 2018-07-13

Arroyo Hondo, Gaviota, CA

This is pretty much the entire portion of the Milky Way that is visible at Arroyo Hondo

Milky Way with long exposure foreground.

Taken on 2018-07-13

Arroyo Hondo, Gaviota, CA

This is actually a panorama of the Milky Way paired with a long exposure foreground and a short exposure to capture more detail from the offshore oil platforms. I was quite happy with the reflections on the ocean of the oil platforms and Mars.

 

Thank you so much ?BillinGlendaleCA, do send us more when you can.

 

Travel safely everybody, and do share some stories in the comments, even if you’re joining the conversation late. Many folks confide that they go back and read old threads, one reason these are available on the Quick Links menu.

 

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