May 21, 2018

Lunchtime Photo

As weekend readers already know, I was up all night on Saturday. Why? Because I was suddenly seized by a desire to go out to Anza-Borrego to do some stargazing. My sister-in-law had sent me a link to some Milky Way photos taken there, and it’s finally late enough in the year that the Milky Way rises at a reasonable hour. So out I went.

Unlike Ireland, which was a bust thanks to cloud cover, Anza-Borrego was great. It’s not the darkest possible place even in Southern California, but it’s pretty good. That makes this the first time I’ve ever really seen the Milky Way, and I have to say that it’s not all that spectacular to the naked eye. Maybe I was too busy with the camera to ever let my eyes truly adjust. But it was certainly a very fine photography subject.

I have two pictures of the galactic core for you. The first one was taken around 1:30 am. The (supposed) key to a great Milky Way photo is to find something interesting to contrast it with, and Anza-Borrego didn’t really offer a lot of options on this score. I tried various things, but in the end a bit of unlit cactus turned out the best:

The second shot was taken at 3 am, and by then the core had wheeled around to a more nearly vertical position:

May 20, 2018 — Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California

I didn’t do anything fancy for either of these pictures. They were exposed for ten seconds with the lens wide open and ISO set to 10000. From there I popped them into Photoshop, did a modest bit of manipulation to brighten the stars and darken the background, and that was it.

POSTSCRIPT: For folks who want to geek out a little more, the big problem with Milky Way photography is noise. Because of the rotation of the earth, you can’t expose for more than 20 seconds before you start to get a bit of motion blur, and even that’s pushing it. And your lens can only open as wide as it can open. In my case that was f/2.4, but even a better camera is unlikely to go past f/2 or maybe f/1.4. That means you have to crank up the ISO to get a good exposure, and that in turn means a noisy picture. The in-camera noise reduction does a surprisingly good job, but obviously it has limits, and you can see those limits in these pictures.

For us amateurs who don’t have pricey equatorial mounts, the answer to this problem is to take a series of photos in RAW mode and then use specialized software to “stack” them. The software aligns the images, subtracts the noise by comparing them all, and then allows you to make adjustments. For you RAW fans out there, you’ll be glad to know that I did take all my shots in RAW mode, but I didn’t take a lot of identical photos from the same spot and didn’t try to stack them. Maybe another time.

Then again, maybe I should buy one of the new generation of very cheap equatorial mounts, which cost as little as a few hundred dollars these days. If I thought I was going to do this more than a few times, I’d be tempted.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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