Mission: Night Photography

This task has been assigned to Evil Sugar.*

The instructions for the task say to explore your neighborhood in deepest darkest night. So Evil Sugar took some photographs.

Here's one that was taken (from inside) at midnight, during a thunderstorm:

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Here's one of a cop car at 2:30am:
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And here's one of people standing around on the Congress Ave. bridge:

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This was all well and good, but there was a decided problem -- Austin is a city, so it never really gets dark. Evil Sugar decided that it would be necessary to adopt a broader interpretation of 'neighborhood.' After all -- everything is bigger in Texas...wouldn't neighborhoods also be bigger?

So Evil Sugar drove for six hours to get to the middle of nowhere** in search of the deepest, darkest night.

Now, here's the thing about dark. If you want really dark, the best place to go is an observatory. Astronomers use those things to shoot faint galaxies and whatnot, so on a moonless night (or after the moon has set), it gets DARK. No street lights, no city lights -- motorists in the immediate area are even asked to use parking lights rather than headlights. Which means that on a clear night, you can see tons and tons of stars.

With this in mind, Evil Sugar decided to take her night shots at around midnight at the McDonald Observatory, which is up in the Davis mountains. She envisioned beautiful photographs of star trails with the observatory in the foreground. Instead, she got:

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The teensy white dots are stars. The problem was that Evil Sugar's camera would not allow exposures longer than about 30 seconds. Evil Sugar thought that she'd be able to override this, but the camera turned out to be too smart to be tricked into a longer exposure.***

Evil Sugar has 207 additional images that look very similar to the one above. They have not been included in the praxis.

Conclusion: The very deepest, darkest night is difficult to photograph.

But once Evil Sugar's eyes adjusted, the deepest darkest night was very pretty to look at. There was a bright streak of Milky Way across the sky, and tons of stars. The discrepancy between the experience and the photographs was disappointing. So Evil Sugar decided to create an image that gave a sense for what it was like:

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The image was made by stacking a couple of the 30 second dark sky exposures (so that the stars would look brighter), then combining that image with a picture that Evil Sugar took of the observatory during the day:

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All in all, Evil Sugar spent about 3 hours standing outside taking pictures of the sky. It was cold and quiet, except for the occasional eerie creaking of the observatory dome (the telescope has to track targets as they move across the night sky, so the dome rotates). The gummy bears got bored, and then eaten (nom nom nom).

By the time Evil Sugar went to bed it was around 2am, but she still got up early enough to take a picture of the sunrise:

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* NOTE: Gummies can actually operate a camera by working in teams:

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However, when gummies are free to shoot whatever pictures they want, they tend to produce images that are inappropriate for praxiorides:

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** Yes, the middle of nowhere is in west Texas. But you aren't really surprised about that, are you?

*** While Evil Sugar was attempting to reprogram her camera IN THE DARK, using only a teensy red flashlight, a team of red gummies jumped on the shutter button to get this picture (because red gummies like red light):