Fast Fiction

For Christmas this year The Man gave me a new telephoto lens (1.9x) for my camera (Sony DSC-V1). This amps up my zoom to 7.6x from 4x.

The first real test of this came last night as I struggled to catch a few images of the Comet Machholz. It’s supposed to be visible (at 3.6-3.8 magnitude) during the early part of January near the Pleiades (just follow Orion’s belt pretty much straight until you hit the Seven Sisters).

The problem I had was two-fold. First, it was pretty bright out with the city lights last night. While I was able to find Orion easily, I had trouble seeing The Pleiades easily. Second, there’s no easy way to scope such a dim object with my camera. True, I’m doing this the old fashioned way - I just pointed the damn thing where I thought stuff was, fired off a shot and then checked it.

The cool part was that I actually managed to point and shoot The Pleiades dead center on the third try. Sadly, I know very little about the manual controls for my camera and just kept changing the pre-programmed settings to see which one would give me the best result. What happened was that whatever the default setting for one of the pre-sets had a nice long exposure, but I think a smidge too long, as the stars ended up as little streaks (probably because of that pesky earth rotation).

I’m hoping to try again tonight and I’m praying for clear weather. At the moment there’s a lovely high-altitude haze over the city.

The other real workout for the new lens will be this weekend when I do my first whale-watching trip!