Message posted by lone wolf on January 29, 2005 at 12:28:02 PST:
I know a photograph of the new taxiway is on this site, so I don't think the photos are two years old. Maybe the copyright has the wrong year. That taxiway is only a year old. A reasonable car will make it to the parking area shown on this website. We are not talking Miata here. You need a telescope for Tikaboo. An equivalent focal length around 2000mm will do the trick as a bare minimum. Even then, you will be cropping the photos. You also need a geared tripod head. It is a good idea to get on some mountain top and practice photographing something 26 miles away before you kill yourself bringing camera gear to the top of Tikaboo. This is especially true if you are using a telescope since some cameras will not meter correctly with a telescope/t-ring connection. Even if you camera can meter, you need to use a magnifying (sp) viewfinder since the base won't really be all that visible in your standard viewfinder. A nikon F3 with dw4 6x viewfinder will do the trick. The winder is a requirement since it allows the camera to be powered from AA cells. Most old cameras use mercury cells that can no longer be purchased. Then there is the issue of filtering. I have done most of my photographs of the base in black and white with an orange (I forget the number) filter. However, I have been experimenting with the William Optics VR1 "minus violet" filter and color film with good results. You need to kill that blue haze. The William Optics VR1 is designed for a telescope (1.25 inch or 2 inch eyepiece threads). If you insist on using "very large glass" plus a teleconverter (or two!), I'd suggest looking at the Sirrius minus violet filters. The advantage of these minus violet filters in general is the light loss is very low for a great improvement in contrast. They are not marketed for this purpose, but rather to reduce chromatic abberations in achromat (i.e. non-APO) optics. The image from 26 miles will lack contrast. I suggest using slide film and a film scanner. I've been using Fuji Astia 100f pushed one stop, but am going to do some experiments pushing it further. [Pushing the film increases the contrast.] If you pay for slide scanning, 2000 ppi is already overkill. The images from 26 miles will have a soft focus.
In Reply to: Re: New Area 51 Photos posted by Kevin on January 29, 2005 at 11:56:48 PST:
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