Looking up

I’ve shared a lot of photos of the sky since I moved into my house in Hamilton. It’s not that I didn’t notice a pretty sky before, though maybe I notice it more often now. Instead, the vast improvement in the iPhone camera has made my photos so much better, especially at night. It’d be rude not to share them.

The photo above was the sky above my neighbourhood a week ago tonight, something I saw when I took the recycling out to the kerb. When I shared it on my personal Facebook, I said: “Went to put the recycling out before going to bed and, as usual, I looked up. Those white dots are stars, of course.”

Someone asked me if I was sure it wasn’t a Starlink satellite, and I wasn’t—though I’ve since found a site that tracks the satellites’ positions around the globe (one can rotate the globe to look in a specific region). However, my understanding is that once they’re in position they turn their shiny side away from earth, though I don’t know that for certain. In any case, the stars are quite bright in the sky overhead, possibly because this part of Hamilton isn’t very built up.

Three days (well, nights…) later, I let Leo outside and noticed the moonlight. I went outside, looked up, and the photo below shows what I saw. The moon would appear through the clouds from time to time, but because the exposure is a long one, that’s not what I captured: The clouds were moving too quickly. Even so, I love this photo, too.

I always knew that if I tapped on a spot in the image on my phone’s screen. The cameras would focus on that spot, however, I recently learned that if I put my finger on a particular spot and hold it there for a couple seconds, the iPhone camera will lock on that spot. That’s really helpful for night photography because the low light requires a longer exposure. The thing is, though, I’m pretty sure this is the first time I thought to do that for a nighttime photo, even though it was so obvious (or, maybe it being obvious is why I didn’t think of doing it?).

I never shared the photo below anywhere before because I’d shared a night sky photo only a few days earlier. The good thing about having a blog, though, is that I can share the two of them together. And so I have, along with the story behind them.

Sometimes I think I share too many photos of the sky since above my neighbourhood, but to be completely honest, it’s the most attractive thing about the area where I live: Right now, we have no parks, no interesting walks, nothing particularly pretty or that's interesting to me except, sometimes, for the sky. Sure, I noticed pretty skies before, but the vast improvement in the iPhone camera has made me so more likely to share photos of the sky precisely because they’re so much better. It’d be rude not to share them.