Lunar eclipse and time-lapse photography

Total lunar eclipse in Mumbai (10th Dec 2011) provided an opportunity to test my photography, and more importantly patient skills. I set up my tripod in balcony, [yeah my Mumbai home have balconies, 4 of them ;) ] at around 5:45 and started to look for moon. Rise was scheduled at 6:04 and I was desperately in search of moon at scheduled time. Difficulty in locating moon was because of thick pollution layer and on top of that I was looking for moon in wrong direction. Moon rose almost in the North-East and i was looking from East to South-East.

Soon the moon was high enough (or Sun was down enough) to be shot with clarity. It was already partially eclipsed at the time of rise and full eclipse was to begin at 7:30PM. So i had 90 minutes to make a series of progressive captures. I set my cell in alarm mode with 2 minute snooze and result was plethora of shots. Though all could not be used as I realised later that within 2 minutes moon does not move enough to make two distinct image on the same background. So in the final photo I chose 19 photos with 4 minute interval. Keeping a good background was as important. So as soon as moon moved out of my camera view I clicked an image with 3 second exposure, which sets the background of image.

This was my first experiment with time-lapse photography of astral movement. I am pretty happy about it.

Just a word of caution for hobbyist photographers. It is often said that photography is an expensive hobby, but i can definitely add that its not only expensive in terms of money but also in terms of time. It took 2 hours to shoot and 2 hours to compose final image. But its worth spending.

Help me photographically

Since last 4-6 weeks I am seriously trying my hands on night photography. My attempts also increased manyfold after a tripod was added to my kit, thanks to Amit, my bro-in-law. But as my night photo-stock grew, so does my worries.

Initially there were many green spots in my shots, as evident from following photos:

I thought that the reason of these light streaks was dust/scratch on the lens or sensor. But the spots were at different positions in all the photos. So I am skeptical about above reasons.

If the above photos were cause of worries, following photos were hard to believe. Can you spot any serious error in those?

How can a camera produce mirror image internally? Its beyond my imagination.

I am using Nikon D60 with Nikkor 18-55 lens and a UV filter.

Please help me if you have faced some similar problem.

Delete Useless e-mails, Save Earth

This strange idea struck me suddenly. I was thinking about my old mails and figured that there must be at least 30-40%, maybe more, mails which I will never refer in my life. But gmail/yahoo is faithfully retaining them, hoping that I might need them any moment.

Worst is the statistics for chat on "gtalk". I regularly chat to different people and all data goes to my storage, 90-95% of which is useless. Again huge servers are retaining them somewhere in the world.

If I put some efforts over the weekend and delete these useless things, that storage would be available for someone else to store useful data. And if I consider myself to be the world average person (Am I?), minimum 30-40% useless data is stored on servers. This required huge power/space/infrastructure to make you data available 24x7.

Now if all of us try to get rid of these useless mails and chats, suddenly there will be tremendous saving of resources.

So take some time and reduce the burden on earth.

If you know some study/research supporting or refuting my ideas, you are most welcome to share it.

have you gahooyoogled?

I just received a mail and could not resist to post it here. Sender sent me link of a website. This is a hybrid of yahoo and google search engines. You give a search in this and it will list the results of both in a split window. Its interesting to notice that results of the both search engines are very different.

Site is http://www.gahooyoogle.com/

Name is also interesting, isn't it?

night trek to siddhagad

One night trek again on last weekend. This post is just to give you a glimpse of morning at sahyadri mountain. Full detail and other pictures will be there soon. Right now I am too eager to share this photo with you. Enjoy this one till next post.