Light pollution, you say?

You know how they tell you about the terrible light pollution that denies the stars to the modern human and all you think about is how crappy half of the street lamps in your town are? Well, no more. Either the Universe has dramatically accelerated its expansion and we’re way closer to the Big Freeze, or light pollution is really stealing our stars.

Last night, after about a week waiting for a clear sky, I set up to shoot the stars from my balcony. It was a bust. Oh, I did learn a few things, one being there’s way too much bleeding light coming from street lamps and houses, to get enough stars to appear in a pleasing way. Also, I did manage to experiment a lot with exposures and full manual controls and I have a clearer idea on how to get pointy stars or trailing stars. I wasn’t expecting to get good or even decent pictures the first time around, but the lack of stars showing up or how dimmed most of them looked even with very long exposures (tried everything from mere seconds to over an hour) was disappointing. So, I have a lot of reading and a lot of practice ahead of me, but the latter will wait until the first weekend in the country where hopefully the sky will be more vivid.