Day 1: We had a wonderful family visit with our son Andrew, his wife Jess and our grandson, Darryl. Andrew and family arrived at 1:00 AM to spend the night with us and then on to the Embassy Suites for the rest of their stay. Continue reading Albuquerque →

Truth or Consequences, New Mexico is near the Elephant Butte State park, it has the largest lake in New Mexico.  Truth or Consequences used to be called Hot Springs. So there are several hot springs spas in town. We chose to go to River’s Bend Spa on the Rio Grand. It was a marvelous day; sunny blue skies, no wind, ducks, birds,  flying fish and on the river in a pool of perfect 102 degree temperature. I have never been so relaxed in my entire life. I held George up in the water first moving him around in a circling motion. The he did the same for me. George described the feeling best by saying, “It’s almost sensory deprivation!” Worth a visit.

I started learning how to photograph the night sky so that I could try and capture the beauty of the sky in one of the few places left on Earth where it is actually dark at night. It is so dark here in Valley of the Gods, Utah, that when you step outside it takes a bit of adjustment to see at all, other than the stars above.

Anyway, after trying what seemed like a million different settings for my Canon Rebel T6i, I found a combination that worked really well. I got my info from an article on the web.  Astrophotography Tips

Basically, the most critical setting is the f-stop. It needs to be set so the aperture is as wide as possible, which means a low number. Then the ISO needs to be set low too. This seemed counter intuitive to me, but high ISO with long exposures creates a “noisy” image. Finally, the length of the exposure.

So, I set the ISO to 200, the F-stop to 2 and exposed the image for 30 seconds using the remote control. Here is the final product, with no retouching.