Allegheny National Forest, Pt. 2

The official – unofficial beginning of summer has come and gone and with it a long weekend spent in the forest. Allegheny National Forest. The 517,000 acre forest is a wonderful retreat and the views are drop dead gorgeous. Camping there has become a fast favorite. My buddy and I have made it a tradition to spend time camping there whenever we can, this time his family joined us. There was plenty of laughs and a few Waltons re-enactments.

My friends are no strangers to photo escapades and this trip was no different. I’m usually the one dragging them out of bed to go climbing on waterfalls or getting up at 2am to shoot the stars. But it wasn’t me this time! Saturday night into Sunday morning the Earth was passing through the debris of a comet P/209 Linear. The show was predicted to be spectacular and to be a regular occurrence. We scouted several locations earlier in the day. Figured out where out best view of the Northern sky would be.So at 1:45am and after six alarms we dragged ourselves out of our tents. Two big pots of coffee were made one to drink in camp and one for me for the road. We piled into the truck and headed down to Kinzua Point to see if we could see those meteors. Not surprisingly we were the only two there. Well we only saw two meteors. But it was really nice to just gaze up at the stars anyway. I decided to lay down on the ground and try to count the thousands of stars in the sky. I knew it was early in the morning. My camera started to pick up an orangish hue. Couldn’t be light pollution, but when I realized what time it was, I figured sunrise was coming. Though I couldn’t see it, the camera did. The birds were starting to chirp. A slow fog was rolling in across Kinzua Lake. It was time to head back to camp. I think it was 4:30am when we all crawled back into our tents, two meteors and a black bear cub later. Okay, so the Camelopardalid meteor shower wasn’t as spectacular as predicted, but gazing at the night sky is always breathtaking.

I didn’t catch any meteors in the photo’s I made, but I started to play with making star trails. This is something I don’t usually do. I usually stay true to the 500 rule, Which is says take your lens length divided by 500 to give you the amount of time you can shoot the stars without getting trails. I usually come in at 31 seconds, using my Nikon 16-35mm f/4 at 16mm.