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Scott Butner
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a few night shots

nice turn in the weather for Easter weekend -- mid-70's during the day, clear skies day and night. So I drove out to White Pass in the Cascades, to shoot the comet and stars over Mt. Rainier.

DSC_8506-Edit by Scott Butner, on Flickr

DSC_8518 by Scott Butner, on Flickr

DSC_8453 by Scott Butner, on Flickr

DSC_8492-Edit by Scott Butner, on Flickr

DSC_8513 by Scott Butner, on Flickr

DSC_8506-Edit by Scott Butner, on Flickr

DSC_8518 by Scott Butner, on Flickr

DSC_8453 by Scott Butner, on Flickr

DSC_8492-Edit by Scott Butner, on Flickr

DSC_8513 by Scott Butner, on Flickr
Replies
Give a feeling of peace
oddly enough, the only other person to stop there to take photos (before the twilight had fully faded) was an older gentleman also from our area (this was surprising enough, given that it was 130 mi from home). It was stranger yet when he said "so, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you must be Scott Butner, the photographer?"
turns out he'd seen some of my photos in Starbucks. Small world.
here's a close up of the mountain:
DSC_8380 by Scott Butner, on Flickr
Crooow:This music would work better with women in bikinis shaking all over the place. I guess that's true of any music really.
Mike
Astronomy lesson for the day:
here's a good example of Zodiacal light -- about halfway between the top of Mt. Rainier and the left edge of the photo, you'll see a faint, sort of roughly triangular shaped cone of light angling slightly to the left from the horizon. This is sunlight reflecting off of dust that is out in space, in the plane of the ecliptic (the imaginary plane where most of the planets orbit the sun).
Music trivia note: according to wikipedia, Brian May, guitarist from Queen, did his PhD disstertation on the topic "Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud" -- turning it in 36 years after starting, due to a slight interruption caused by...oh, becoming a multi-millionaire rock star.
To those with good monitors and patience for such things, if you enlarge the photo to full screen, and look just above the mountain, you'll see Comet PANSTARRS (closest to the mountain) and the Andromeda Galaxy, slightly above it. Both will look like slightly fuzzy spots compared to the sharper stars. On Wednesday, these two objects will come close to overlapping, or so I'm told...of course, they are millions of light years away from one another, but they'll LOOK like they are neighbors.
DSC_8485 by Scott Butner, on Flickr