January 25th, 2005. About 11pm.

(Please see the first picture in this series for a description of where I was, and what I was doing)
I've always loved astronomy, but you really have to be dedicated to enjoy it in Alaska. It's just too cold (for me) in the winter, and too light in the summer. However, there are a few times when I get up the motivation to drag my sorry ass out into the cold, such as this cold, clear night in late January.

With my trusty Sony F717, I set up a tripod along the Seward Highway, about 10 miles south of my house. It was quite cold out (probably around zero). Ordinarily, that temperature isn't SO bad, if you're dressed for it, but because I had to work my camera, I couldn't wear any gloves. For that reason, I ended up leaving before I really wanted to, but I think I got a couple of decent shots.

This is looking straight across Turnagain Arm, at the mountains on the north shore of the Kenai Peninsula. It was actually almost pitch dark out there, but thanks to a very slow shutter speed, you can see more in the picture than I could in real life. This picture was taken with a twenty-second exposure. Two problems I ran into that night (other than the cold): I originally came out to take some pictures of the moon, but my camera doesn't have quite enough of a zoom lens for that (which is why I really want to get an digital SLR) and when you start to hit the 15 or 20 second exposure time frame, the stars start to blur, since the Earth goes right on rotating underneath you. I suppose I would need some fancy-shmancy star-tracking tripod like you see on good telescopes. Ah well...maybe when I'm rich. Also, this picture was lightened up a bit by using the "Levels" feature in Photoshop (I couldn't lighten these up too much, as you can really start to see the noise from the camera's imager) Sorry, didn't mean to go on so long! Here's the picture: