Land Of Ahs

The state of Kansas once called itself “The Land of Ahs” in its promotional materials. Get it, Land of Ahs=Land of Oz. Yeah, I know. This church sits near my parents’ little farm near Parsons, Kansas. We visited last weekend to enjoy an early Thanksgiving feast. (Cheese grits live on!) The farm is out in the sticks, closest town is six miles away, so it’s a great place to see the stars. For this shot I stacked 97 photos, each of which had a 30 second exposure. The advantage is that when the photos are combined, you don’t get the sensor noise that shows up on a single long exposure. It was the first time I’ve tried this particular star trails technique and it didn’t turn out as I expected. To do this right, you need an intervalometer to automatically make the exposures. Higher-end cameras have the intervalometer built in and you can buy inexpensive small intervalometers that plug into the camera. I had to use some computer software that has intervalometer capabilities and shoot the frames with the camera tethered to my laptop.

It’s a cumbersome arrangement and it didn’t work quite right. I let the camera sit clicking on the tripod while I went back to the house for an hour. When I came back, the software informed me it had attempted 160 shots or so but could only process 97 of them. No idea why that happened. Then I loaded all the photos into Photoshop and ran an action I found on the Internets that combines all those exposures into one shot. Some of the star trails are kinda jaggedy and I don’t know what caused that exactly. Was it the software? Was it camera movement from the slight breeze blowing that night? Who knows. Also the trails near the North Star are really faint. I suspect that was because I had the aperture stopped down to f/8. I needed to have it a little wider for such short exposures. The stacking did work well to get the exposure on the front of the church. Several cars passed by and swept their lights across the church when they turned the corner. I’m going to get a real intervalometer and try this shot again.

Here we have a more traditional star trails shot I made later that night. I just put the camera on bulb and opened the shutter and let it sit for about 50 minutes. I had some technical difficulties on this one, too. When I came back, the camera had shut itself off. I thought maybe the batteries had run out, but there was plenty of battery left. Maybe it got too hot and tripped some kind of breaker. The metadata on the frame said the exposure was 30 minutes exactly. Maybe the shutter will only stay open for 30 minutes, but I know I’ve taken longer exposures than that a couple of times.

The thing sticking up in the middle is an old grain silo on the farm. It’s green from a big yard light shining on it about 200 yards away.

Abby and Gramps got in a little fishing. They couldn’t find any worms, so they used dog food. They didn’t catch anything.