Stars

I’m choosing to photograph the question, “Why is the moon visible in the early morning?” I find this question interesting because generally the moon is thought to be only visible at night, when in reality you can see it in the early morning hours before it disappears. I also find this interesting because the moon is so photogenic, its very easy to photograph as it is visible throughout the night, from almost any location. The moon also changes shapes and on occasion even color. This also makes things interesting and not as boring to continuously photograph.

Recently I randomly started thinking about constellations. I always try to look for them when I'm outside star gazing, but I never seem to find the actual constellations so I decided to do a little research on constellations. Apparently constellations aren't even real at all, people just made them up to help us tell which stars are which. Since certain constellations are only visible during certain times of the year farmers would rely a lot on the constellations in order to determine when it was time to plant.

If you were up this morning at about 3 a.m., you might have been lucky enough to catch the first meteor shower of the new year. These meteors, called Quadrantids, have a maximum rate of about 100 per hour. Unfortunately, the Quads tend to last only a few hours (a shorter amount of time than most showers), so if you missed them this morning, you probably won't be seeing them again for a while. These little babies are most likely fragments from a comet that broke apart several centuries ago, and whizzed by this morning at 90,000 mph.

One question that I came up with when asked to create a question that could be photographed was: How did humanity choose the calendars we use today? In terms of photography, there are a lot of options from here. I could photograph the sky, the sun, and the moon, among other astronomical subjects. I could also simply photograph people and try to capture the thinking process, or even go so far as to display ancient ruins which might hold a key to the answer of how time was established.