I made a short agenda for myself:

  – set up camp 
  – catch up on some writing 
  – find tonight’s shooting site 
  – organize shooting targets, schedule 
– fix the broken connector on the battery holder for the Pentax camera
  – prepare, make coffee, organize car 
  – take nap

This was more than a full day’s work. I never got to take the nap, but I did drive all the way around the crater’s rim, checking out the various overlooks, trailheads, and picnic areas, evaluating each for their access, orientation, and opportunities for interesting nighttime landscapes.

The wind had died down momentarily, and I could marvel at the now calm, now blue, Crater Lake. The blue color is a reflection of the sky, the smoother the surface, the truer the reflection.  It seemed that the smoke in the air had mostly cleared, making today’s view of the lake a beautiful sight.

The sky is polarized. Humans can’t see this directly but wearing a pair of polarized sunglasses reveals it. Tilting your head while looking at the sky will show it to lighten and darken with your tilt angle. I wondered what happens to the polarization after being reflected by water. I took various pictures of the lake through a polarizing filter I had brought. My results were inconclusive, but attractive, nevertheless. A reflecting surface adds a polarizing effect of its own (polarizing sunglasses are designed to cancel it), and the combination becomes more complicated than I was willing or had time to figure out.

I also enjoyed watching the sightseeing boat that motored around in the lake. Its wake propagated uniformly and unhindered across the glass surface, until eventually encountering the shore, which then reflected back out into the lake crisscrossing itself. Just like the physics wave lab tanks, but on a grand outdoor scale!

Nightscape Odyssey
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