When you can't see the stars...

Astronomy is a sometime thing (apologies to George Gershwin). Light pollution, haze, clouds, so many things can sabotage a night of stargazing, so what do you do when you want to see a star but can't.

Well, study the thing that blocks your view. I've been impressed with how well phone cameras can perform after the sun goes down. For instance, sunset doesn't necessarily end when the sun goes down. The sun may have set on you but the clouds above you are still in line if sight of a low, red sun.

Here are some low clouds over Centennial, Colorado about half an hour after sunset. 

Recently, we've been having some very uncharacteristic thunderstorms in the area. It's difficult to impossible to capture a lightning strike in a photograph, but a video is a different thing entirely.

Thunderstorm

Fog, smog, clouds are all interesting in their own light and they show a different face at night than they do during daylight.

I tossed around whether to blog the eclipse or not. I'm not planning to deal with astronomy until 2019, but I took some pretty decent photos so I caved.

Denver was in the area of about 90% eclipse, so it was pretty nice. A few of the tribe were planning to go to the path of totality in Wyoming but didn't get to, so we had a yard party.

I set up my cell phone on a tripod with a #14 welder filter over the aperture and took the following photos.

The sun, filtering through the fir tree in the back yard also produced some nice pinhole effects.

And there was some nice iridescence in the high cirrus clouds moving into the area, but it didn't come out very well on the photos.

Still, it was a nice day with family and the last total solar eclipse that I'm likely to see in this lifetime.

I'll probably review these photographs in more detail in a couple of years.