Locomotoring

There are probably a million photos of galaxies and nebulae that look astounding. So why take another one, an amateur one at that?

For one, it is not just another photo, it is an experience surrounded by a set of circumstances that won’t repeat themselves ever again. For another, it is a set of photons that are starting out more than a thousand light years away and reaching our camera lens, and no where else.

It was Sunday night, last night of our trip to the Panamint Valley. Earlier that morning, we had vacated the group star gazing site organized by the Eastern Sierra Observatory. That night we were photographing from the Panamint Valley Resort campground. We had left the Orion nebula for the last night, having focused on two easier targets the first two nights – Andromeda galaxy and the Pleiades cluster.

On a mid-October night in the northern hemisphere, Orion nebula rises late in the night. While we had prepared ourselves for a long night ahead, we didn’t know how long our photoshoot would last. One of the frustrations with early stages of astrophotography is a high chance of failure – a number of hardware components from a broad ecosystem of manufacturers, and nerdy software have to work together. The system itself is a bundle of wires connecting fragile looking scopes and boxes, ripe for tripping in dark. Troubleshooting is futile in the absence of internet in these remote areas. Furthermore, I wasn’t quite sure what our camera would capture. Photos on the web are taken by professionals through filters of various wavelengths, and then heavily post-processed. All there was, was hope. The Orion nebula (aka Messier 42 or M42) appears to the naked eye as a fuzzy patch in dark sky. Messier catalog objects are easier to observe deep-sky object since Charles Messier, a French astronomer cataloged them back in 1770s sitting in Paris with a relatively small-aperture refracting 100mm telescope.

The particular campground is well kept and the associated restaurant is exceptional. It wasn’t a surprise that it was popular. Campers were coming in late, many were setting up camp in the dark. To our right were two astrophotographers, an old man and a younger one. They were quiet and like us wore red lights, their presence noticeable only when their gears moved from pointing to one location in the sky to another. To our left was a group of young people by a roaring fire. They talked constantly. I confess that I was annoyed that they never shut up long enough to look up and gaze at the stars. They kept up the fire all the way until they crawled in their tent to sleep, never allowing their eyes to adjust to the darkness. We were setup right at the campground boundary and we were expecting an uninterrupted desert ahead of us. But that wasn’t the case, a bright headlight bobbed up and down until well past midnight. Was it a human or a human’s donkey? We would never know.

The equipment did run into issues but nothing a few hard reboots wouldn’t fix. We did trip on the wires just as we were leaving for dinner and had to redo the polar alignment. It meant that we missed the opportunity of getting hot dinner at the excellent restaurant and had to make do with cereal and milk in our motel room. But while we waited for Orion to rise, we caught the Orionid meteor shower. Every year Orionid meteors appear when Earth travels through an area of space littered with debris from Halley’s Comet. The name Orionid is for our benefit – to orient the viewers towards the Orion constellation where the meteors are best observed. These meteors are fast moving and have a long tail.

The first photo of Orion nebula made the long wait worthwhile, it turns out that nebula’s purples and blues are in the visible spectrum! When we grow up as astrophotographers, we might be able to capture the non-visible portions of the spectrum. For now, we were delighted with the purples and blues. And then we waited for another hour while the camera took more photos (for stacking). And all this while, we stared deep at the dying star Betelgeuse, got excited by Jupiter and saw many more meteors. Our camera did manage to capture one meteor.