Photographing Extraterrestrial Beings...
The Milky Way is our galaxy that contains our Solar System. It is a barred spiral galaxy with a diameter between 100,000 light-years and 180,000 light-years and is estimated to contain about 100–400 billion stars. There are probably at least 100 billion planets in the Milky Way. We are located within the disk, about 26,000 light-years from the Galactic Center. This is good enough to show us how tiny we are.
The Milky way can be seen with the naked eye if you are standing at a very dark spot on the earth and therefore it can also be photographed surprisingly without any special equipment.
To shoot the Milky Way requires a lot of planning such as where you are located? when would the milky way rise? in what direction would it move? what are the moon set and rise timings? and most importantly what it the weather like?
To answer most of these questions is a relatively easy task nowadays with handheld applications (www.darksitefinder.com, PhotoPills etc.) at your fingertips. In terms of equipment you'll need:
1. a sturdy tripod
2. a very wide angle lens (16mm and below)
3. a very low f-stop lens (f/2.8 and below)
4. a wireless or wired trigger
Last night, a group of us embarked on an adventure of capturing the milky way deep down in the UAE desert. The timing was right. The moon wouldn't be in the sky all night long, the milky way would rise in the SOUTH-EAST direction just after midnight until sunrise.
Shooting the milky way was a whole new experience but it brought me to wonder if there was some extraterrestrial being photographing us right now too ?
