Guam Day 86 - Night Photography over Ritidian

5/9/2022 - Night Photography was something that I really wanted to try here in Guam, part of the reason of bringing the camera this far. My reading, and hope, is that the light pollution here on the island is some of the lowest in the nation. We are surrounded by nothing more than ocean for thousands of miles. 

One of Joan's coworkers and I went out to Ritidian and setup our cameras at the viewpoint looking over the hill. I have experimented with settings and things before, but really this was a relearn of how to work the camera in low light for both of us. Something that we didnt give much thought to was the moon overhead, its about a half moon at this point, and even with low light pollution this is quite the source to have to overcome. All part of the learning, next time we will time our shots for post the moon setting or on a new moon night. Also, I think really late night shots help as well with less humans being out and about, my first shot shows a car midway up the hill with the lights on. Actually, that could make for a neat shot if you could capture the car moving all the way up the hills. We burned a number of shots just tweaking settings, really fun to be out with another techie photographer. He is a really nice guy. 

My first shot on this post was actually taken at night believe it or not. The length of time the camera was open allowed enough light in to make this photo almost look like daytime or sunset. If you are able to blow up the image to full size on your screen, the stars poke through the clouds, there are hundreds of little light spheres there. No that's not dusk on your screen like I originally thought. Image two give a better sense of what the evening light levels were like, once again those stars come out. 

The last shot is of the Big Dipper, in this case high above in the sky this evening. The cup is upside down, I learned from my dad on walks as a kid that this was a sign of the summer sky. Over time this cup will circle in the sky, season to season. Very hard to image that there is a winter sky here on Guam. 

Very fun, the two of us will try again later in the month to see what a darker sky gives us. Supposedly the milky way clouds can be captured on a very dark night.