“Welcome to the machine!”
This is another of my images submitted last week as a part of my study, under the architecture category.
Following is my justification text submitted with the image.
Enter the MOA astronomical telescope.
The largest land based optical telescope in the New Zealand, with it’s 1.8m primary mirror, and 80megapixel redband CCD camera.
This magnificent piece of technology is used collaboratively by New Zealand’s University of Canterbury, and Japan’s University of Nagoya, to discover Exoplanets in the depths so space.
This is done using a scientific method known as Gravitational Microlensing,
I chose this as my subject for the architecture image, as I’m intrigued by the combination of spherical, cylindrical and linear shapes used in the construction of the enormous (10meters in diameter) dome which houses the telescope.
I took this image while the dome hatch was open at twilight, as the researchers ran preliminary setup before they started their hunt for planets!
I’m always inspired by seeing MOA at this stage of the night.
Settings:
Focal length: 70mm
Shutter speed: 10 sec
Aperture: F/8.0
ISO: 100
Reasons for settings:
As it’s a very large subject and I wanted reasonably undistorted lines and a front on view, I positioned myself 30-40m back from the dome and zoomed all the way in on my 24-70mm lens.
To ensure I retained as much detail and as little noise as possible, I set ISO to 100.
I wanted the subject’s full depth of field in focus, apart from the sky in the background which didn’t matter.
From my distance, F/8.0 did a good job of keeping the whole subject sharp.
The image was taken at twilight, so light was becoming limited.
My trade-off for keeping ISO at 100 was that I had to shoot a long exposure of 10 sec with the camera on a tripod.
Challenges I faced:
Diminishing light meant I could not shoot the photo hand held.
I needed to use long exposure and have the camera on a tripod to keep everything sharp.
The lines of the architecture became distorted at a close range with a wide focal length.
I remedied this by moving away from the subject and zooming in as far as my lens would go.
