astrophotography

Sky Stuff 1: Apps & Websites for Weather and Celestial Events

/ Seattle Park Lover / 2 Comments

This post is the first in a new series about things that happen in the sky. This topic relates to parks because city, county, state, and national parks are often the best places to go to observe or photograph stuff in the sky.

For Part One I am providing suggestions for apps and links to websites in a variety of categories. You have to know when and where things are happening in order to go see them and these resources help with that. The tools are particularly useful for photographers.

Upcoming posts will have tips for when you might want to use specific sites and apps, where to go, and details about chasing the aurora borealis.

Many of the links below take you to pages for Seattle. But once at the site you can enter a zipcode (postal code) or name of a town to find the info for your part of the world. Once you’ve done that, I recommend bookmarking the site if the info looks useful to you. I have all the links sorted into my Sky Stuff bookmarks folder in a web browser so they are easy for me to find and use.

All apps listed are free unless otherwise noted.

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Total Lunar Eclipse 2019

/ Seattle Park Lover / 4 Comments

 

Readers who have been with me since 2015 may remember I had a less than successful outing photographing the lunar eclipse in September that year. All of my pretty bloodmoons were blurry and I was sooo disappointed. You can see my post about that experience here.

I had to wait until 2018 to try again. But alas, clouds. No eclipse viewing for Seattle that time.

The next total lunar eclipse was this last Sunday, January 20th. Not a good time of year for clear skies in Western Washington, and the cloud cover forecasts in the days leading up to the event were offering little hope.

But wonder of wonders, there was some clearing. It ended up depending on where you were as to whether it was completely cloudy, partly cloudy, or mostly clear. I totally lucked out in north Seattle where it was mostly clear.

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Photography for Beginners Part 15: Types of Night Photography

/ Seattle Park Lover / 4 Comments

Each post in this series builds on information discussed in previous posts. See the Photography for Beginners page on the menu for links to all the posts.

Part 14: Night Photography

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I had put many hours into writing and editing the second part of Night Photography and it was ready to post last November. Then my tablet died. I not only lost the completed post itself, but all my outline notes I’d been working from. I was demoralized back then, and it took me this long to finally attempt to recreate the post. Now, many more hours later, here it is.

This is a continuation of Part 14. In that post I covered a variety of tips for shooting at night. In this post we’ll discuss some specific types of night photography.

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