You haven’t heard from me in awhile, but there’s a very good reason. It was the moon’s fault.

You remember back a couple three weeks when we enjoyed the lunar eclipse? Well you know I was out in my backyard attempting to capture the beauty of it all.

I thought it was going to be easy.

I went out early in the evening, before the eclipse began, and shot an image of the moon just to make sure I could focus and get the light right. The camera auto focused on the moon and I was happy with the image.

So I went to bed and set the alarm for 2 which is when the news people said we’d be close to the full eclipse. But that was silly. Because when I got out there after 2 a.m. I had missed the whole first half of the eclipse. I don’t know what I was thinking!

I did, however, get to see the full eclipse. I wasn’t really enjoying it in the moment though because I couldn’t get the camera to focus.

Turns out there was so little light coming off the moon that the camera couldn’t figure out what to focus on. The focus ring kept moving, the lens trying so hard to find something to latch onto, but it continued to fail. Meanwhile the eclipse was moving right along on schedule. So I changed it to manual focus and tried to do the best I could, using skills learned in my Milky Way class.

I went back to bed at 5 a.m., cold to the core, but happy knowing I had 191 images. Of the moon. And even though I knew a good percentage of them were garbage, I knew a handful would probably be good. Or at least good enough.

In the morning I downloaded the images to an external hard drive because my laptop memory is pretty full. But when I went to open up my first image all I got was colored lines.

I and my husband have been trying off and on since then to figure out what the deal is. I’ll save you all the details, but it turns out if you shoot in RAW you need to have special software to read the data and see your image. At least you do with my new camera, the Nikon Z6iii. It’s confusing because I know for a fact that I haven’t had trouble shooting and reading RAW images in the past. All my night shooting has been in RAW and this has never been an issue.

It’s a lot like those running shoes I used to wear. As soon as I found a pair that felt good the manufacturer would change something and I’d have to find a new shoe.

Anyway.

Today husband finally figured out that we needed to download Nikon’s software which he did on our desktop computer and I finally got to see my moon images for the first time since sitting out there in the cold, all those weeks ago.

Today I deleted lots of images. I kept lots too. But this one, the one below turns out to be my favorite because of the stars shimmering around the moon.

Now I know you can’t actually see the stars, I usually have to lighten up images quite a bit to post them on WP or FB. But oddly tonight when I tried to edit this image the entire Lightroom Classic edit page is different. I can’t find the crop. I can’t figure out how to make the stars shine brighter. I can’t find much of anything. So…tired and feeling defeated, I give up.

What you see is what I’m able to figure out. I’ve spent way too much time today trying to get stuff to work. Tomorrow, I promise, is another day.

And right now I’m going to go back to the desktop with it’s big screen and look at this image and sigh, remembering a magical night under the stars.

You guys will have to take my word for it.