Dark Skies

This one is about aspirations and memories. I'm hoping to recover something lost decades ago, only better.

On our trip north we're stopping in Moab, UT for a few days - or rather, nights. OK, both actually, but this time the nights are also important. Moab's surrounding area is a designated a "Dark Skies" area, one of those vanishingly rare places where one can actually see stars, particularly the Milky Way. (Google photos of Arches National Park at night.) Our timing just happens to be during the "new" phase of the moon, when nights are darkest. 

It isn't guaranteed, of course. It might be cloudy. Hopefully, not all 4 nights. And, oh hell, no forest fires upwind please please please. Being me, of course I am hoping to get photos. I will be happy enough to just see their night sky, but thrilled to shoot it. Of course, therein lies a logistical problem. My shoots-everything palm-of-the-hand digital camera doesn't have a shutter control where I can set it on a tripod and leave it open for 30 seconds or however long it takes for stars. I do have an older camera that might. So I have a project ahead of me.

First, there's charging the very old battery to see if it still takes a charge. And holds it. If it passes that test, there's the process of refamiliarizing myself with it. I didn't do that good a job with it in the first place, since it had auto settings where the camera does the work depending on which button you set it for. Lazy me. But I bought it for better things than that, like  being a SLR - single lens reflex. I can look through the viewfinder rather than try to see a black screen on the back - impossible in full sun! I can set it for moving animals by having it keep clicking shots until I stop holding the button down - or not. Being a SLR, I can have it click immediately rather than waiting that full-second-plus that digital cameras take. I bought accessories, storing them in a huge camera bag, and promptly abandoned it when the little CoolPix came along. 

The old saw about how to take a great picture was "F8 and be there." I fell down in the "be there" part. My bigger, heavier SLR simply became too inconvenient to lug around, and the optics on my tiny one let me both zoom way in and severely crop pictures to get what I actually want to see as a finished product. It will still be my main camera, but it just can't get a decent night picture unless you want to use flash. No leaving the shutter open.

So if the battery works, I'll have to take out the manual and learn how to use my old camera manually - pun intended. I'll also have to actually check whether it has the time exposure feature. (Yeah, I suppose I could start with that part, eh?) And assuming everything's a go, there's lots of time to practice, and plenty of SD cards which make  all that practice free. Unless of course I need a cable release for the shutter like I needed wa-a-a-a-y back when when I was shooting with film in my Pentax K-1000, the real camera which still has my heart. No fiddling with digital menus, just twirling dials until the pointers lined up, and press. If they could take the front of that one and replace the film space with battery and SD cards, hog heaven! It's still around with all the accessories. (Somebody? Anybody?)

Why is all this important to me? First, around 65 years ago when I first started looking at the sky, I could actually see it. I grew up on a resort in Hubbard County, Minnesota. From there the family moved into the county seat, still a small enough town that skies, when clear, showed stars only dimly remembered today. It was clear enough I could still find the Milky Way, though it never looked the way the professional pictures do today, all those nebulae and a bright band of light. I counted 9 stars in the Pleiades, not the 7 it was supposed to have, and still almost caught more if I moved my eyes just so.

Down in my Phoenix suburb, light pollution is so bad the only constellation I can find on good nights is Orion. I know how to find Polaris, both dippers, Cassiopeia, Draco, Bootes, and more, just not here. Not ever. It never really gets dark here. Were I so inclined, I could safely find my way over the lumpy sidewalks and between cacti in people's yards at midnight. (Maybe get arrested too, but that's another matter.) 

Of course there's never any northern lights this far south. During one Homecoming celebration when I was still in Junior High, attending because I was in band, when the flames of the bonfire burning the opposing team's stuffed dummy rose red into the sky, they were met by red auroras covering the entire sky above them, dancing a long tango, flames and aurora finally fading out together. 

This I can never recapture. But maybe the stars....