Sun

Yesterday the usual November greyness gave way to a more inspiring weather. The days are quite short (sunrise at 8:58 and sunset at 15:38), but clear weather gives more than one hour of extra light compared to the rainy greyness.

Typical colors for the time before we get snow and have some occasional sunny days.






The long and warm fall has some plants confused. In this photo I lifted the exposure slightly and pulled down the darkest color in Lightroom. Simple and effective.


Same trick on this photo as well a some additional vignetting.








Around sunset the weather seemed unusually clear, but by the time I had eaten dinner and enjoyed my excellent French roast coffee a slight haze had come in and there was no point in doing any more serious night sky photography. The lights from the city pollute the sky too much for that. I still walked a few hundred meters from my home to get away from the lights to test a new night sky focusing tehcnique I read about: There is a setting in the camera that resets the lens to infinity focus when powering down. As I expected, the lens did not focus accurately to infinity. The only option is manual focus against a suitably bright star or planet. Jupiter was too bright and it was hard to judge when it was sharp. The focusing consist of making a dot as small as possible and with Jupiter the range in which the dot was small and sharp was unnecessarily big. Dimmer stars on the other hand are not visible. Fortunately, the sky is full of stars and planets of different brightness.