Adam Bacher
INTO THE NIGHT
What I did on my pandemic summer vacation.
The time window to photograph the night-sky is tremendously constrained during the summer months. Twilight above the 45th parallel lasts so long in mid-summer that it is not dark enough to begin photographing until after midnight. And by 3:30am, the photo window closes with the onset of dawn. If the moon is up, star light becomes washed out, restricting the number of nights available to photograph. Long exposures, compositional adjustments, airplanes and satellites polluting the night-sky, further limit the amount of time to get that just-right image.
With work obligations, and because it takes a minimum of an hour and a half driving to get away from the city lights, I’m only able to photograph the night sky a handful of times in any given summer.
Not so this year. The pandemic provided as much time as I wanted when conditions allowed. I did more night sky photography this summer, than I did in the past four. And with comet NEOWISE passing by, there were even more occasions to photograph.
Thank you COVID.