The Milky Way's closeup: Summer is star season over Fort Griffin
FORT GRIFFIN — Who knew galaxies had a season?
The Milky Way Photography Workshop was held in early June at Fort Griffin State Historic Site. Located about 13 miles north of Albany on U.S. 183, the historic 1867 fort has some of the darkest skies in Texas.
On the Bortle dark-sky scale, Fort Griffin comes in at a 2. Only Big Bend is darker.
“You still get some light domes on the horizon, but generally, if you look up, you're going to see the Milky Way,” said Eric Abercrombie, the assistant site manager at Fort Griffin.
Milky Way season
“Galaxy season” runs from mid-winter to the end of June. It’s called that mostly because the Earth’s position makes it a good time to view far-off galaxies. In summer, the Milky Way dominates the night sky.
Lynn Cromer has decades of photographic experience. He led the early-June workshop, along with friends David Stubbington and Andy Smolenski.
Abercrombie said the trio will return Sept. 6-7 for another workshop.
An architectural photographer, Cromer said astrophotography has captured his interest in the last eight years.
“Most of it’s been right here. I love this place,” he said. “It’s really dark.”
Lesson one: Don't eat stars
Workshop students, using tripods, digital cameras on manual and wide-angle lenses, learned a certain Zen about how to shoot.
Often, in-field coaching ended with, “Let’s just try it and see what we get.”
In my case, Cromer explained to me not so much what I’ve been doing wrong, but how I could do better.
The first thing was to turn off noise reduction, or NR, in my camera. Normally I find myself making pictures in poor light. NR fixes the splotchy pixels I get from pushing the camera to its limits, but it struggles distinguishing stars from noise and hot pixels.
“Yeah, turn it off because it'll eat all the stars,” Cromer advised.
But focus was where I struggled. I shoot using DSLR cameras, not mirrorless, and so had to fall back on “Old Skool” focusing skills.
Back in the days of bellows cameras — the kind seen in westerns and toted around by Ansel Adams — with a cloth over your head you’d focus using a small optical magnifier, or loupe, on the camera’s glass back.
Fast-forward to 2024, I’ve got my framing set and a test frame ready. Cromer tells me to open a picture on my camera’s screen, magnify it and put a loupe over a star.
“Huh. It’s got a hole in it,” I said.
“You have a donut,” he replied. “If you see a hole in the middle of a star, it’s not in focus.”
Great, now I was blurry and hungry.
I took a new picture and then checked my focus. Took another and focused again. Rinse, lather and repeat.
To infinity and beyond
Every lens has an infinity mark on the focusing ring. It’s right there at the end. If anything were to focus at infinity, it’d be stars, right?
Right?
“Infinity isn’t infinity,” replied Smolenski. “Every lens is a little bit off.”
Doh!
“You can focus on something as far away as you can see and then point it up at the stars. They won’t be in focus,” Cromer said. “It's just weird.”
I’d already locked my exposure in with the lens’s aperture wide-open at f/2.8 and a 15-second shutter. ISO, the camera’s light sensitivity, was at 4,000, more than half what I use shooting football.
This was my sweet spot. A higher ISO would allow for a quicker exposure but also more noise. And longer time would allow the Earth’s rotation to blur the stars.
However, camera work is only half of the equation here.
“First thing I'm going to tell you, don' t believe anything you see on the back of this camera,” Cromer said later. “When you take it out and put in the computer, you're going to go, 'Well, what's that?'”
Stack attack
Workshop days were used for teaching how to tone students’ pictures using Adobe Lightroom, as well “stacking” multiple photographs to address noise.
“The way I look at it, you treat a pixel like a bucket. It's so dark in a single picture, you can’t get enough electrons in that bucket,” Cromer said.
Using a free program called Sequator, stacking — or combining separate pictures of the same scene, fills those “buckets” with the combined pixels that occupy the same location in each individual picture. As you “stack” the pictures into a single frame, those consistent spots become brighter.
The noise appears too, but since it randomly occurs within each frame, the software eliminates it.
“And so, you increase the signal and get rid of the noise,” Cromer said.
Paint by the numbers
Our subject was the Milky Way, but Fort Griffin offers its 157 year-old ruins as subjects, too.
“Something Lynn introduced me to was low-level lighting, using a continuous light for the entire duration of the exposure,” Abercrombie said.
The dim light adds a glow in the ruins, its warm color contrasting with the cooler Milky Way.
Smolenski also assisted me in “light painting” one of the ruins. Using partially-covered flashlights, we counted seconds as we “painted” stone walls to elicit detail but not so brightly to distract from the sky.
Other lights appeared in frame too. Passing airplanes rendered as thin, dotted lines. Yellow swirls weren’t UFOS but lightning bugs.
Honestly, that was nearly as exciting.
Bedtime for sidekicks
We finished after 1 a.m. I’d brought Lilybelle — my daughter is a fan of all things outer space — and we had a 45-minute drive home ahead of us. She talked about getting a gas station burrito in Albany, but 10 minutes past the fort's gate she was snoring in the backseat.
I stole glances at the Milky Way above me as I drove. Before we left, Lilybelle and I attempted a Milky Way selfie. In my haste, the picture came out a little soft, and now as I drove, I stewed over my sloppiness.
I’d known better. Cromer had shown me how. Ah, well; next time.
“See?” he’d said. “You learned something.”
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This article originally appeared on Abilene Reporter-News: Summer is star season over Fort Griffin
