Monday, August 25, 2008

Clouds of Stars and Mosquitoes

We had a slight backwards wind today, with clouds and a little rain. But the skies cleared up quite nicely in the evening. I zoomed out to the south end of Bonaire for some stargazing.

The stars were really great but the mosquitoes were absolutely brutal tonight. I was re-applying repellent every 10 minutes or so, but they were still attacking any time I quit moving around.

Kind of made it hard to look through the telescope. I didn't even get the binoculars out of their cases, but I did enjoy the views for an hour or so with my bare naked eyeballs. And I snapped a couple pictures, one of which came out pretty good.

This is a single three minute and 48 second exposure of the Milky Way star clouds in the constellation Scutum. M11 and M26 are visible towards the middle of the picture and to the right of the middle of the picture.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What? You didn't use any of Bud's "Bug Mace"?

Brad said...

Ha ha. I had three different brands of stuff on me, but none of them happened to be Bug Mace. I'm going to try to lure Sandra out with me tonight if the stars are good and she can try Bug Mace, and I'll try the most powerful stuff I've had experience with, "deep woods off", if I can find some.
With mosquitoes as voracious as they were last night, there may be no solution short of a mosquito net to keep them off.