Transiting SurprisesSunset over Moffit Field after the Transit of Venus Sunnyvale, California Willie and I left work earlier and found the an empty parking garage near work to setup camp and photograph the Transit of Venus. The Transit started around 3pm and that meant we had to leave work earlier. At one point Willie went back to work and then eventually went home to finish off the Transit. I decided to stay. Have you ever spent several hours sitting on top of a parking structure, alone, with absolutely nothing to do but make sure your camera is taking a photo every minute? Yea, I didn't think so, because it's BORING as heck! About an hour and a half before sunset I thought about racing home and finishing off the Transit there, as Willie had done. That's when I noticed that some beautiful clouds were beginning to roll in. I decided to stay. Right about that time I felt my phone buzz and I looked down to see a text message from Willie: "Are you still there? DON'T LEAVE! I'm coming back!" He had seen the sweet clouds too. Willie and I watched what we had hoped would be a gorgeous sunset turn into a huge disappointment. A little bit of color lit up some of the clouds with some orange colors and then they faded. Willie packed up. I had 2 cameras and 2 tripods out and as I finished packing one of them I looked up to see the sky behind us was starting to turn a beautiful pink. I raced to put the D700 on the tripod as the sky began to light up with pink, purples, and fading oranges. What a treat! We hadn't expected there to be a good sunset … got our hopes up … were disappointed … and then were surprised when the sky lit up again! I clicked off a few photos but wasn't really happy with any of the compositions that the top of a parking structure offered. Just when I thought the light was fading and began to pack up my tripod I noticed that more of the sky had taken a purple color. I pulled the camera back out, and being too lazy to setup the tripod I bumped the ISO up a bit and snapped 6 photos with the intention of putting them together into this panorama. This photo looks out over the NASA Ames facility. In the background you can see the skelaton of Hanger 1, which is under repair to remove toxic chemicals that were found to be leaking into the ground. Hangar One is one of the world's largest freestanding structures, covering 8 acres. It was built in the 1930s as a naval airship station for the USS Macon, a rigid airship (aka blimp) built for the navy. On the right you can see one of the new Moffit Towers buildings, which is currently being renovated for Motorola Mobility to move into. Earlier in the day I knew that I wanted to use the glass panels of the building to reflect the sunset and I think it worked perfectly here! Nikon D700 w/Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S: 24mm, f/8, 1/50 sec, ISO 640 6 images stitched together in Photoshop
Lazy VenusTransit of Venus Sunnyvale, California While I was photographing the Transit of Venus with Willie he screamed "AIRPLANE!" and I raced over to my camera and the two of us just fired off our cameras as fast as we could. He beat me to it (check out his shot, it's seriously sick!) but I thought this came out awesome as well! The next time Venus passes between the sun and Earth will be in 2117 and I'll prob. be dead! Nikon D300s w/Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6: 300mm, f/6.3, 1/10 sec, ISO 400
Venus in TransitTransit of Venus Sunnyvale, California A couple days ago Willie informed that another awesome astronomical event would be occurring: the Transit of Venus in which Venus travels in between the sun and Earth and can be seen as a teeny tiny little dot in the sun. I already had solar glasses and a solar filter that I purchased for the recent Annular Solar Eclipse so I was all set for the Tuesday, June 5, 2012 Transit of Venus! Since the transit started at 3pm I decided to leave work early to take a timelapse of the entire event. A bunch of interns had just started and being a former lead of our intern program I decided to invite them along. Willie, some interns, and I left work and found a nearby parking garage and drove to the top. We made it with just enough time to setup our tripods and start shooting away. For the next 5 hours I took at least 1 photo every minute! My plan is to create a little time-lapse video showing the transit, however, photoshop cannot automatically align the images (300mm on a DX body wasn't enough to get 40% overlap) so I have to manually align each image (ugh -- and there's 450 of them … double ugh)! Towards the end of the Transit some clouds rolled in and blocked part of the view of Venus but also made for some really interesting scenes! Willie also noticed at one point that an airplane was flying right into the path of the sun and I raced over to my camera to snap a couple shots! It was also interesting to see how ovular the sun gets as it sets. As the sun sets to a lower elevation angle the suns light rays have to travel through a greater part of the Earth's atmosphere -- when this happens the rays bounce more and are visible with greater distortion. To our delight, we were treated with an absolutely BEAUTIFUL sunset after the sun went down. I almost packed up my gear before the sky just exploded with color. There wasn't much to play with compositionally but I think I have something that came out pretty nicely. Stay tuned for more from this day! Nikon D300s w/Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G ED-IF AF-S VR Most of the images taken something along the lines of: 300mm, f/5.6, 1/250 sec, ISO 200
