Our house on Chula Vista is about an hour’s walk, or 15 minute bike ride, from the nearest restaurant or coffee shop. Although this is not ideal, we knew that we had to choose between dark skies and having a low walk score. Light pollution maps indicate that our new address is a 4 on the Bortle scale. The place we are renting now is Bortle 5, slightly more light polluted. At Bortle 5 we can see traces of the Milky Way on a clear night, as it was last night.

Taking in the whole starry sky is wondrous. And it inspires deeper exploration. Almost immediately after moving to Santa Fe we purchased a 10 inch Dobsonian telescope. On clear nights we haul it out onto our deck and search the sky for interesting targets. With this massive telescope we’ve been able to find some globular clusters like m13 (Hercules Globular Cluster) and Albireo, a beautiful amber and blue double star. A couple of nights ago I found Andromeda and the rings of Saturn. I want MORE. Even with a massive telescope, I can’t see the beautiful, colorful nebulae especially well. Andromeda is just a blurry smudge. So, we are working our way into astrophotography. A Star Adventurer GTI tracking mount allows us to take long exposures with Robert’s Sony A7 DSLR.

This is a start. I think we can do better by taking more exposures and stacking multiple photos together to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. These photos are composites of three photos and some inexpert manipulation in photoshop. It’s clear that this hobby would happily take all of our time and money if we allowed it to.

Stargazing

Bees