This weekend we took a break from moving and carried on the ancient tradition of attending the Blue Skies music festival near Clarendon Station, Ontario. This year was amazing... we had great weather all weekend, the music lineup was really interesting, and we had clear skies at night for stargazing.

Some of the highlights from this year's lineup included That 1 Guy, Gareth Pearson, Jory Nash, and a whole bunch of others.

After the Friday and Saturday night concerts, I took advantage of the clear skies to set up my binoculars to look at Jupiter and the Moon. On Saturday night before the Moon rose I decided to take a short break from the concert and take a full sky photograph using my fisheye lens. Since I have a full frame sensor in my new camera, I can see the full 180-degree field of view of my Peleng 8mm fisheye! Compare this week's photo to one I took a few years ago with my Rebel XT and you will notice the difference. This is a good example of what people mean when they talk about "crop factor" for cameras with smaller sensors.

One very special highlight from this year's Blue Skies started when I had my binoculars set up on Friday night. Lindsay Ferguson walked by and asked what we were looking at, and I said "Jupiter". After she looked through the binoculars, she said "I see some other stars beside it," and I said "those are the moons of Jupiter." I think this pretty much blew her mind... then on Sunday I was walking past a workshop in the meadow and I overhead people talking about the moons of Jupiter. It turns out that it was a songwriting workshop being run by Linday, and Susan was there as well. They were writing a song about Blue Skies, and they worked in some lyrics about Jupiter, then Lindsay sung it at the concert on Sunday night, with Susan and a few others as backup singers.

I got it on video... the first HD movie I have shot with my new camera. Check out Blue Skies To Jupiter on YouTube. Watch it in 720p for maximum goodness. That was just one of the many magical moments from this year's Blue Skies. I'm really glad I took some time off to go this weekend instead of spending the whole time packing and cleaning.

Technical details: This photo was taken my 5D Mark II + Peleng 8mm fisheye at 8mm, ISO 6400, f/8 for 30 seconds.

Comments

Now I know you type in all the technical details manually, because you don't
have a Peleng 9mm fisheye.  I think it's an 8mm.

How right you are.  The copypasta gods (I guess that would be the FSM) were not
with me that day.