Category Archives: Maps

The Danube Waltz Redemption

Prague: The Warm-Up Act That Steals the Show

We arrived four days early. The same logic as before: jet lag is brutal, and planes are sometimes unreliable. My pre-failure here was in not securing business class seats – but we managed. This time we stayed in Prague rather than London, which turned out to be the right call. Prague is spectacular, and unlike London it doesn’t charge you £400 for the privilege of being rained on.

The Old Town Square alone is worth the airfare. The medieval Astronomical Clock – the Orloj – performs a brief mechanical procession of apostles every hour. The audience of tourists pointing phones at it would confuse the 15th-century clockmaker, but I think he’d be pleased the thing still runs.

We walked the Charles Bridge in the day, and again at night. It’s lined with 30 Baroque statues of saints, each one dramatic enough to star in its own cathedral. The bridge is pedestrian-only, and the imposing Prague Castle lit up on the hill, reflected in the Vltava below – is exactly as good as every photo you’ve ever seen of it. Possibly better.

At left: Old Town Square at night. The Astronomical Clock tower (left) and the Church of Our Lady before Týn (right). The clock has been running since 1410 – before Columbus sailed, before the printing press, before anyone thought to call it “Central Europe.”

*Long exposure of the Charles Bridge from downstream using the telephoto (5x zoom). The reflections give you two photos for the price of one.*

*Kafka’s Head” – stainless steel sculpture by David Černý*

“Kafka’s Head” is a 45-layer rotating stainless steel sculpture by David Černý near the Palladium shopping center. The layers spin independently and periodically align into a recognizable face. Franz Kafka was born a few blocks away, which seems appropriate for a man who spent his career writing about fragmented, bewildering identities. What do I mean? Well Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) follows traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes up transformed into a giant cockroach. Yeah, that Kafka.

Street view from the *Art Noveau Palace Hotel, Prague*

Breakfast in the dining area of the Art Nouveau Palace Hotel, Prague, looking down a typical street through an arched window. Prague is full of interiors like this: elegant, unhurried, and considerably cheaper than the equivalent in Vienna or Paris. And it was just blocks away that we found Svíčková. But you’ll have to wait for that.

*Prague’s terracotta roofline from the grounds of the Prague Castle complex.*

The city looks much as it has for centuries, which is either extraordinary preservation or a shortage of developers with ambition. You can see that ambition is not lost on the newer parts of Prague – check out those MANY cranes in the distance!

A practical note: Prague is extremely walkable if you are willing to do a lot of walking. The food is excellent and cheap by Western European standards, and the transit system is clean and reliable – or so we observed. We arrived late on the first day, and the three days remaining felt short. If you can swing four, do it. Word of caution: beware any ATM machine that say “EuroNet”. They are well documented tourist traps with hideous exchange rates. And by the way, that is the least best thing about Prague. The Czech Republic (and Hungary) use their own currency. In the republic currency is called the koruna, or crown (code: CZK) not the Euro. In fact, Hungary (with its forint’s) was the only place where we had to switch phone plans to stay connected. The good news is that credit cards are accepted just about everywhere.

Prague Walking Track — March 2026

Prague Airport and Walking Track – March 2026

GPS track recorded during pre-cruise exploration

Passau: A Lovely City With a Dark Footnote

From Prague we traveled by coach to Passau, Germany – our ship departure point. Passau is a small, photogenic city at the confluence of three rivers (the Danube, the Inn, and the Ilz), which gives it a layered, peninsular quality. It also floods constantly, which the locals have documented on their buildings with remarkable precision.

Our Passau guide, Esther, was originally from Singapore, married a German, and earned her citizenship – giving her an outsider-insider perspective on the city that was worth any organized tour. She walked us through the city pointing out trams and buses, oddly named streets and flood marks. She explained German bureaucracy with the rueful humor of a survivor, and then told us about a four-year-old boy who once fell through the thin ice on the Inn River and was pulled out by a local priest who later became the St. Stephen’s cathedral organist.

“That boy,” she said, pausing for effect, “was Adolf Hitler.”

<- Our guide, Esther, pointing out the high-water marks embedded in the wall. Each plaque records a different flood year. The marks go considerably above head height. The uppermost plaque, recording the highest flood reads: After the birth of Christ, in the year 1501, on Our Lady’s Day, the floodwaters rose to the cross. Passau has been doing this for a very long time. The street name: Roßtränke means “Horse Trough”

*St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Passau. Home to the largest pipe organ north of the Alps (17,974 pipes). We did not hear it play.*

Passau also had opinions about geopolitics. Several shop windows in the Old Town displayed signs reading “Putin’s Supporters: No Entry.” Central Europe’s proximity to Ukraine makes the war feel considerably less abstract there than it might from, say, Seattle.

It’s worth noting, too, that many of the towns and countries we visited along the Danube have taken in enormous numbers of Ukrainian refugees. We spoke with Ukrainians everywhere – some tending shops, some cleaning them, some in heavy industry, many aboard ship. The most Ukrainians taken in per capita were in Estonia, Czechia (aka the Czech Republic), Slovakia – and Ireland. Bravo to those countries for their hospitality. Poland received more but they are much larger country – and, of course – a neighbor to the Ukraine.

It was palpable to us, as American’s abroad, in that the war with Iran was started on February 28th, was still ongoing during our sojourn abroad – and is still ongoing today in June as I write this.

Aboard the Viking Vilhjalm: The Flat-Water Difference

The Viking Vilhjalm is a river longship measuring 443 feet long, 38 feet wide, and hauling 190 passengers. The Viking Vela carried 998. The most immediate practical difference: nothing rocks or rolls. The river is glassy, the ship is flat, and at no point did anyone measure the tilt with a bubble level app. This was, I cannot overstate, a significant improvement.

The Vilhjalm from the Chain bridge over the Danube. The dining room glows through the panoramic windows – a reminder that one of the pleasures of river cruising is dining while watching the city drift past.

The Viking Vilhjalm docked in Budapest as the blue hour settles in. The Buda skyline – Fisherman’s Bastion, Matthias Church – lit up behind it. This is what “docked in the heart of the city” looks like.

River cruises also pass under bridges and through locks with impressive frequency and minimal clearance. The wheelhouse folds flat hydraulically, which you can watch from the sun deck (if allowed, that is, some under-crossings are less spacious than others). The captain threads the ship under railway bridges at night without drama. On our previous cruise, “drama” was essentially the entire experience. The contrast was noted and appreciated.

*Night passage. The wheelhouse is partially retracted to clear the bridge. The margin looks alarming; apparently it is not.*

The smaller passenger count means the crew learns names, preferences, and jokes. Which brings us to the Hannah Waddington situation.

Rebecca from Ted Lasso, Apparently on a Career Break

One of the dining crew was the spitting image of Hannah Waddington – the 6-foot-tall British actress who plays club owner Rebecca Welton in Ted Lasso. tricia, who cannot let a good resemblance go unnoted, asked her if anyone had ever said she looks like the star.

She paused. “That’s the first time this year!”

Then: “…and this is the first cruise of the year.”

The delivery was impeccable. She had a wickedly good sense of humor and warm presence to match, and by the second day we – along with a growing number of other passengers – were specifically seeking out her section. If you sail on the Vilhjalm and a tall, very funny woman who looks uncannily like Hannah Waddington is working the dining room: request her table. Don’t call her Hannah, though, her name is Anett, and she’s from Latvia. You’re welcome.

Linz and Pöstlingberg: A Frankfurter Worth the Climb

Linz is Austria’s third-largest city and the one most likely to surprise you. It sits at the foot of a vine-covered hill called Pöstlingberg – which roughly translated means “the postal area mountain”. You can reach its heights by a historic tram that begins downtown and claims to be one of the steepest adhesion railways in the world. At the top of the Pöstlingbergbahn you will find a Grottenbahn – which is a whimsical “grotto railway” for children. It wasn’t running, we missed that train. The tram left from this very square.

Linz’s Hauptplatz (main square) with the famous “LINZ” letter sculpture framing the Plague Column. Yes, “Plague Column”. That’s a bit of history North Americans did not have to endure, and many cities have monuments erected commemorating the end of the Black Death. Linz has worked hard to rebrand itself as a cultural city – it is the birthplace of Anton Bruckner a bizarre man and brilliant composer, and home to the Ars Electronica festival. Also, regrettably, the hometown of Hitler. A city dealing with a complicated legacy.

At the top of Pöstlingberg, the Schloss Bräu restaurant has a deck with a panoramic view of Linz spread far below in the Danube valley. We had the Frankfurters. Two of them each, served in a delicious crunchy pretzel-like bun with shredded fresh horseradish. It sounds humble. It was not humble. It was the second-best thing I ate on the entire trip, and I ate some genuinely excellent things on this trip.

Pöstlingberg, looking back down over the rooftops to Linz in the valley and the Danube beyond. The Schloss Bräu restaurant is to the right of this picture, but has a view much like that large terrace you see at the right. The Frankfurters are not visible but trust me

Göttweig Abbey: Apricot Dumplings and Baroque Excess

Between Linz and Krems is Göttweig Abbey (Stift Göttweig) which is a Benedictine monastery perched on a hill above the Wachau Valley that has been operating since 1083. The docking is in Krems – so you’ve already had chance to catch a glimpse of Göttweig high up on a hill before a bus takes you there. The current Baroque buildings date to the 18th century and are, in the way of 18th-century ecclesiastical architecture, considerably larger than necessary.

Stift Göttweig. The foundation stone was laid in 1083; the current complex was rebuilt in Baroque style after a fire in 1718. The abbey produces its own wine, olive oil, and apricot products from the surrounding orchards.

The Wachau Valley is Austria’s most celebrated wine and apricot-growing region, and Göttweig’s café served apricot dumplings (Marillenknödel) – soft potato dough wrapped around a whole apricot with its pit removed and replaced by a sugar cube, rolled in buttered breadcrumbs. You have not had apricot dumplings until you have had apricot dumplings at a Benedictine monastery overlooking a UNESCO World Heritage valley. I’m setting the bar deliberately high.

The Wachau Valley: Castles Included, No Extra Charge

The stretch of Danube between Linz and Krems is the Wachau. And it is a UNESCO World Heritage landscape of vineyards, medieval villages, and castle ruins perched on cliffs. It is the kind of scenery that makes the cruise fare feel justified regardless of everything else.

*Schönbühel Castle, which has watched the Danube since the 12th century. The current structure dates to 1821. It still looks appropriately medieval from the water.*

The town of Dürnstein is where Richard the Lionheart was imprisoned in 1192. His loyal minstrel Blondel supposedly wandered Europe singing outside castle walls until Richard sang back – one of history’s more musical jailbreaks. The ruins are still on the cliff above town, and the blue Baroque church tower below makes the village look like a painting someone left out in good weather.

*Dürnstein. The blue church tower belongs to the Augustinian monastery. Richard the Lionheart’s castle ruins are on the cliff above. He did not leave a review.*

Sailing through the Wachau on a clear March morning. The Austrian flag indicates we’ve crossed from Germany. The valley looks exactly like a UNESCO site should.

Vienna: More Than a Day Could Justify

Vienna got one full day, which was not enough. It is enormous, beautiful, and packed with imperial grandeur at a density that becomes mildly numbing – the opera house, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the parliament, the Burgtheater, Stephansdom, all within walking distance, all built to impress, all succeeding.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum on Maria-Theresien-Platz, facing its twin the Natural History Museum across the square. Both were built in the 1890s and both contain more than you can see in an afternoon.

*Stephansdom (St. Stephen’s Cathedral) in the heart of Vienna. The spire is 448 feet tall.*

The outdoor café in the foreground seems unbothered by the huge spire and features something worth stopping for: Kaiserschmarrn – which is literally translated “Emperor’s Mess” – it’s a delicious pancake thingy. If there is no table space, you can find a take out window with a quick moving line.

It seems every city we stopped in had it’s own composer of record. I couldn’t keep them straight. When I blurted out “Richard Strauss” trying to answer our Vienna tour guide query: the guide’s stern eye and swift correction “Johann Strauss” made me realize I made an embarrassing faux pas. Johann is from Vienna, Richard is from Berlin. It felt for a moment like I had put ketchup on a hot dog in Chicago.

Come back for three days minimum. Consider bringing a museum membership.

Bratislava: The Underrated One

Bratislava in Slovakia gets less attention than Prague, Vienna, and Budapest, which is undeserved. The old town is compact, walkable, and genuinely lovely. The Primate’s Palace, where Napoleon and Austrian Emperor Francis II signed the Peace of Pressburg in 1805, is among the finest Neoclassical buildings in Central Europe, and the compact scale of the city means you’re never far from something worth seeing.

*The Primate’s Palace, Bratislava. Napoleon signed a treaty here. It now houses the mayor’s office, which seems like a reasonable use of a landmark.*

Bridge of the Slovak National Uprising, also known as the **UFO Bridge**, located in **Bratislava, Slovakia**

Speaking of landmarks, the most unusual bridge we passed beneath was the “UFO Bridge” in Bratislava, Slovakia. It is odd in that it is a cable-stayed bridge that has a single pylon with a “saucer shaped restaurant” at the top. We had the time to give it a try, but decided to remain on our side of the Danube and enjoy the view instead.

The bridge was built in late 1960s and early ’70s at the height of Communist excess, in honor of the 1944 resistance movement against the Nazi forces. It’s probably the ONLY communist era structure with pizazz. Throughout the Slavic countries, astute guides will point out how to easily distinguish Soviet era buildings from any others: the Soviet Era buildings are the ugly ones, i.e. gray, square, and unembellished.

What NOT To Do if You Are A Linguist

Now might be a good time to point out what not to do when in any former Slavic country. Language is my thing. I am weird that way. I’m fairly fluent in German so Passau (Germany) to Vienna (Austria) was easy. But Czech’s of course speak Czech, while Slovakians, Slovenians, and Croats all speak their own dialects – but each mostly understands the other. The mistake NOT to make is noting aloud how each “Good Morning” greeting sounds like Russian which is pronounced “DOBRaye OOTra”. I made that mistake several times (I’m a slow learner) as I tried to pronounce local “Good Day” and “Thank You” variations. All those countries were once under the thumb of the Soviet Union, of which they do not like to be reminded. Everyone I spoke to – including the Hungarians – agreed that Hungarian is the most impossible language ever. This is especially amusing to me now, because one of my photos appeared in the Hungarian edition of “The Economist” and that partially explains the bizarre way they spelled my name in the credits. A Hungarian article about when I won the Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest came with a similar, unrecognizable, transmogrification of my name.

While I’m on the subject, here are a few notes for us Westerners. What German speakers call Donau (Duh-NOW) we call the Danube. What westerners call “Prague” the Czechs – who live there – call Praha, Wien (pronounced VEEN), is the actual name of Vienna. If it seems almost everything Czech (Č) ends with a “ch” or an “itch” … well, that’s because almost everything does. To their credit, they bother to show how to accent things. English is a quagmire.

Budapest: The Grand Finale

Budapest may be the most photogenic city in Europe. I say this having just come from Prague, Vienna, and Bratislava, all of which are lovely. Budapest operates at a different scale of dramatic. The Danube cuts the city in two – Buda on the west with its castle and Baroque churches on the hill, Pest on the east with the Parliament and the grand avenues – and both sides light up at night in a way that makes the river between them glow.

*The Hungarian Parliament building from the Buda side by day. 879 feet long, 96 domes, 691 rooms, built between 1885 and 1904. Still the largest building in Hungary.*

*The Parliament lit gold at night. The daytime photograph is impressive; the night photograph is something else.*

*One of the four lions guarding the Chain Bridge, with Buda Castle lit above. The lions were installed in 1852 and have been criticized ever since for lacking tongues. They remain silent on the matter.*

*60 pairs of iron shoes, installed in 2005 to commemorate the Jews shot here.*

Budapest also contains one of the most affecting memorials I have seen anywhere. That’s saying a lot. My wife and I both stood along the long black marble Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, DC and we wept as we watched a legless wheelchair-bound vet rub his hand slowly and somberly over the name of a fallen colleague.

Along the Pest bank of the Danube, 60 pairs of iron shoes mark the spot where Hungarian Jews were shot by the Arrow Cross militia and fell into the river during the winter of 1944–45. The shoes represent different people: men’s shoes, women’s shoes, a child’s. There is no plaque required to understand what you’re looking at.

In fact, I didn’t notice when I took the photo, but someone has placed Ukrainian flag ribbons on a pair of women’s shoes – a quiet statement about history’s tendency to repeat.

*Breakfast aboard the Vilhjalm, docked in Budapest. Matthias Church and Fisherman’s Bastion through the window. The coffee was also good* – per my wife. I mostly drank peppermint tea.

One of the pleasures of river cruising is waking up docked in the heart of a city. Breakfast with Matthias Church visible through the dining room window is a specific luxury that anchors-and-tender ocean cruising can seldom match.

The Food: An Itinerary Within the Itinerary

*Svíčková na smetaně: braised beef in creamy root vegetable sauce, with cranberries, lemon zest, cream, and bread dumplings on the side. The Czech dark beer appears to have been involved as well.*

A Danube cruise feeds you well on both sides of the gangway. The single best dish of the trip was Svíčková na smetaně – a classic Czech preparation of braised beef sirloin in a rich, creamy root vegetable sauce, served with bread dumplings (knedlíky), cranberry sauce, and lemon zest. We learned about it from our driver from the Prague airport, who had grown up in Czechoslovakia during the communist era and steered us toward it with the conviction of someone passing on essential knowledge. He was right. If you are in Prague and you skip the Svíčková (SVEETCH KO VAH) in favor of something you already know, you will regret it. The same driver said something that really stuck with me:

“The Czechs and the Slovaks split the country, and only the politicians remember why.” The Velvet Divorce as it is called happened in 1992. Each country is less populous than the city of Los Angeles.

The second-best dish – which was mentioned earlier and surprised me – was a humble Frankfurter at Schloss Bräu in Pöstlingberg, above Linz: served in a crunchy pretzel bun with shredded fresh horseradish. Simple ingredients, flawless execution, and a view of the Danube valley as a bonus.

Göttweig Abbey’s apricot dumplings have already been covered in the relevant section but deserve a second mention here because they were awesome – not to mention the fact that the ship’s chef prepared a cooking demonstration about how to make them. The chef had very strong opinions about why the way he and the Viennese made schnitzel was superior. “It seems foolish to me to get a delicious crispy finished dish and then place it in or cover it with a sauce that makes it soggy.” He was very right!

Some of the local flare was less impressive, of course. One of the worst mistakes we made, food wise, was attempting to get Vietnamese food in Prague (What WERE we thinking!?) In our defense, Slavic food is much like German food. Heavy on the sauces and shades of brown, butter and meat – so the Vietnamese fiasco was an attempt to get healthier, lighter fare. It was reminiscent of traveling in Spain where it seemed nothing green was going to ever appear on a plate and we pleaded with the hotel for a plate of broccoli. In Slovenia, green appeared on the plate, but parsley just doesn’t count as a vegetable, does it?

*Slovenian sausage with sauerkraut and sides in Ljubljana, complete with a Slovenian flag toothpick. Local restaurants in Ljubljana take the flag – and the sausage very seriously.* We were less of a fan.

*Breakfast aboard the Vilhjalm. The kitchen arranged the Eggs Benedict, sausages, and bacon into a smiley face (Of course it was Anett’s doing*)*. The food was consistently excellent, but this particular presentation was memorable.*

The Viking ship’s own kitchen was consistently good. Genuinely good. Not “good for a boat.” The Eggs Benedict arranged into a smiley face one morning was a small detail that suggested the kitchen was paying attention and having fun. But everything was consistently good to excellent.

Zagreb and Ljubljana: The Bonus Round

The post-cruise days took us first to Zagreb for two days, and then to Ljubljana for two more. Both of which exceeded expectations.

Zagreb has the confident ease of a city that knows its own value without needing to advertise it. The Croatian National Theatre – canary yellow, impeccably maintained since Emperor Franz Joseph inaugurated it in 1895 – anchors the lower city. The upper town is medieval, quiet, and connected by a funicular that is so short it feels more like an elevator with ambitions.

The Croatian National Theatre, Zagreb. Emperor Franz Joseph I inaugurated it in 1895. The flowers in the foreground are a reminder that spring arrives in the Balkans before it arrives in, say, Seattle.

*Zagreb has a lot to point you toward. The bicycle appears to be making its own decisions.*

Much of Zagreb was still enrobed in exterior scaffolding due to the 2020 6.4 magnitude earthquake (there were actually TWO that year). With a population less than 6 million people, and lots of very old buildings, I can see where having a small tax base makes all the fixes a protracted endeavor. One of the remarkable things about all the guides is how well versed in history they were. They were talking about dates in 1081, and 1400s. Being an American we have only a fraction of that history to remember.

While we were in Zagreb, there was very high security at the Esplanade Zagreb Hotel where we stayed. Apparently there was an international financial conference being held there. The police stopped the cars and tram on the street and we watched from the front steps of the hotel as an entourage of vehicles displaying Ukrainian flags rolled up. We tried to be inconspicuous, thinking that we might catch a glimpse of Volodymyr Zelenskyy – the leader of the besieged Ukraine, but, alas, it was not him.

Ljubljana, Slovenia is smaller, warmer, and aggressively charming. The Dragon Bridge and its four bronze guardian dragons, the old town’s distinctive Art Nouveau facades, the castle on the hill above – Ljubljana operates at a human scale that lets you actually be somewhere rather than trying to keep up with it.

*Ljubljana’s old town. The decorated façade at left belongs to the Cooperative Bank building, designed by Maks Fabiani with distinctive folk-Art Nouveau ornamentation.*

Ljubljana punches above its weight architecturally. And yet it’s compact and EXTREMELY walkable – especially from our hotel the Grand Hotel Union Eurostars, Ljubljana. If you have been struggling with that city name (which I did for a LONG TIME) there is an easy way to get it right: just pretend the “J”s are “Y”s. Lyublyana (or Li-u-bli-an-a, if you’d rather). It was my second favorite city. (Prague and Budapest tied for first).

*One of the four copper dragons of Dragon Bridge. The city’s coat of arms features a dragon; the bridge takes the heraldry literally. They are said to bring good luck to true-born Ljubljanans.*

*Ljubljana Castle courtyard, Slovenian flag above the clock tower. The castle dates to the 12th century; the city has been climbing the hill to visit it ever since.*

Lake Bled: Save the Best for Last

A day trip from Ljubljana to Lake Bled, was perhaps, the best day of the trip. Bled is one of those places that looks like a screensaver and turns out to be better in person, which feels like a minor miracle.

A glacial lake. A medieval castle on a cliff above the eastern shore. A Baroque church on a tiny natural island in the center of the lake, the only natural island in Slovenia, is reached by traditional flat-bottomed boats called pletnas. Julian Alps rising snow-capped in every direction. Even in late March, in mildly overcast weather, it was remarkable.

*The Church of the Assumption on Bled Island, photographed from Bled Castle above. There has been a place of worship on this island since the 8th century. The current church dates to the 17th.* The 10x zoom on the phone came in handy here.

One of the nice things about our Croatia and Slovenia extension is that because it was the beginning of the season there were just four of us. We fit comfortably into a van and were ferried around everywhere with one constant guide and driver. A lovely couple from Tennessee were good company throughout.

*Near Bled: an Alpine house with the Julian Alps rising behind it. Slovenia is a serious mountain country and doesn’t get enough credit for it.*

Viking vs. Viking: The Comparison

For anyone wondering whether a river cruise redeems the ocean cruise experience, here is the short version:

The river cruise wins on intimacy, stability, and access. 190 passengers on flat water, docked in city centers every night. You wake up in Budapest, not anchored somewhere offshore. The crew knows your name by day two. Nothing flies off the tables.

The ocean cruise wins on scale and spectacle when the weather cooperates – and the Norwegian fjords (when we finally reached them in Eidfjord) were every bit as spectacular as promised. When the weather doesn’t cooperate, it wins on spectacle of a different kind. See: the original article.

The Danube Waltz itinerary packs an exceptional density of civilization into eight days of sailing: the Wachau Valley, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest – all dockside, all walkable from the gangway. Add Prague, Zagreb, and Ljubljana as bookends and you have a genuinely hard-to-beat two-week itinerary through the heart of Central Europe.

Would we cruise Viking again? We already answered that question by booking this one. We’d do it again. Perhaps not in the North Sea. In January.

Photographer’s Post Trip Observation

We chose to travel with one suitcase each and one carry-on each. Instead of bringing my normal photo backpack laden with camera gear, I chose to try JUST using the phone. I definitely missed some great night sky and landscape photo opportunities. I definitely wished I had brought a simple tripod. The one huge mistake I made though: I forgot to turn on GPS location tagging for my photos until near the end of the trip. But the phone did afford me with good photos, communication, and I was able to use GPS (from the tracking app I used). That tracking turned out to be a life saver in remembering which of thousands of photos came from where.

All in all it was not a terrible trade off – especially since the 5x and 10x lenses on the Samsung came in handy on several occasions. It would have been much harder to do without bringing multiple seriously large lenses. I think next trip, however, I’m going to lug the big tripod and the “real” camera.

If you’ve cruised the Danube Waltz or visited any of these cities, drop a note in the comments. And if you want context on why anything short of a hurricane felt like a triumph on this trip, the original Viking Vela story is here.

About the images: All photos taken with a Samsung S24 Ultra unless otherwise noted. GPS tracks were recorded throughout the trip.

Photographing Aurorae with a Night Capable Camera

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Photo 1: Jupiter and diffuse, but bright aurora on our first night. ***f/3.5, 5 sec, ISO 4000, 20mm***

This is part 2 of a multi-part series on observing and photographing an Aurora. Please read Aurora: The Bewitching Glow for background information including information about what an aurora is, when, how and where it can be seen, and photographs from Aurorae we observed near Fairbanks, Alaska.

So I Have to Get Lucky?

Before we jump into the details and the 3 keys for getting a good aurora photo, I think it is wise to set expectations about how likely you are to see a truly astounding aurora. Photo 1, above is one of the first captures I got on the first night on site (December 14). It was unexpected because the weather had been completely overcast all day. On December 17, the display was ASTOUNDING. I asked staff at Borealis Basecamp – which caters to aurora goers – as well as locals in Fairbanks, and I poured over the data to determine just how lucky we were to see the jaw dropping display we observed. The short answer is… “luck comes over time”. We used the Book and Hope method described in the first article to observe the aurora, arriving on December 14, 2023 and departing on December 18th – that is 4 nights onsite. But because we didn’t use the Monitor and Go method what we couldn’t have foreknown is how much the sun would cooperate with our aurorae dreams.

Diagram 1: M and X class solar flares in December, 2023.

Take a glance at Diagram 1, above from the SpaceWeatherLive.com archive. Fortuitously the most energetic solar flare (category X) in the preceding SIX YEARS occurred on the first day we arrived (and on New Years eve). The solar wind travels at over a million miles an hour (1.6 million kilometers per hour). But the sun is 92 million miles (147 million kilometers) away, so the effect of the flare on aurora production may occur in as little as 36 hours or as many as 4 days later. Even during a solar maximum events of this magnitude only occur infrequently. December 2023 saw two X class flares in one month – there were zero X class flares in the prior 5 months at all! The Kp Index exceeded 5 a total of 16 times in the 4 month period which means an exceptional once a week event might be a reasonable expectation during this part of the solar cycle.

Eli Fox, the chief photographer at Borealis Basecamp and the man who runs much of the Borealis Basecamp social media [Instagram] [Facebook] told me that exceptional aurora events occur on average about once a month or less.

A solid plan and good luck go hand in hand. But do not let that dissuade you. The displays we saw on two other nights were very pleasing and still produced great pictures.

Can I Get a Good Photo with ANY Camera?

Photographing aurorae is not different from the night photography we cover extensively on this site. If your camera is able to take acceptable Milky Way photos, it’s a good candidate – the aurora is generally much brighter than the brightest portions of the Milky Way.

Photo 2: Looking up. Bright fast moving aurora. Notice The big dipper at the left.
***f/2.8, 2 sec, ISO 6400, 18 mm***

While these articles are now starting to show their age, the principles still apply:

Surprisingly, some cell phones can do a respectable job and we will cover using cellphones in the next article in the series.

For any night photography the following minimums are recommended:

a sturdy triopd,
- a (ball) head and
  - a quick release, and
    - a shutter release (e.g. an Intervalometer) whether cabled or wireless. I prefer cabled intervalometers as I’ve had things go horribly wrong with wireless ones.

It also helps to become very familiar with the settings and controls for your camera and tripod – familiar enough that you can operate them in the dark with little or no additional light. That level of familiarity comes with practice… so if you are out of the habit, we strongly suggest practicing in your back yard (or in a dark closet). Practice while wearing the gloves that you intend to use! I discovered that merino wool glove liners were sufficient to keep my dominant hand warm even when the temperature dipped to -20F – but there was no wind and I avoided allowing any snow to remain on my glove liner – preferring to use my gloved hand or jacket sleeve when brushing away snow. Snow on my glove liner would have melted due to my body heat and made me miserable. I carried a pair of outer gloves with me, in fact, I kept a glove on my non-dominant hand at all times while my dominant hand had only the glove liner. The other outer glove remained in my pocked with a chemical hand warmer activated should my hand get cold!

Additional Photo Gear for Dealing with Excessive Cold

I brought quite a lot of gear to prepare for the affects of extreme cold on my person and my camera equipment. The camera equipment I brought included:

1. Five power banks – these were used to power “dew heaters” (aka lens warmers), as well as heated clothing.
2. Four of the powerbanks also were hand-warmers, most have built in lights.
3. Pouches in which I could keep the powerbanks, chemical handwarmers, as well as cables.
4. A large sealable plastic bag that can hold the entire camera and lens.
5. Carabiners to hold the pouches to my tripod.
6. And my standard practice of affixing velcro to key places near the top of my tripod with the mating velcro on the back of my intervalometer(s). This keeps the intervalometer in a usable place and prevents it from falling or catching the wind.

The pouches had operational electric hand warmers or chemical hand warmers to keep the power bank in them warm. I thought about, but did not use external batteries for my camera. Conceptually using external batteries permits using a larger battery (or using plug-in power) as well as keeping the camera batteries warm without warming the camera. The extreme cold is GOOD for your images. Deep sky astrophotographers typically use super-cooled sensors for their work, and your camera benefits from the cold, too, in the form of less noise.

If you use chemical hand warmers (charcoal, salt and iron filings), they need some airflow to keep generating heat – so don’t put them in a bag with no airflow. Indeed, if you want to reuse them, you can put them in as small a possible plastic bag to extend their life.

However I did keep spare batteries in my interior pockets where my body heat would keep them warm should I need to swap batteries. With the power banks, I also brought extra cables, an extension cord, and a 7 station USB charger. Of course all the regular stuff is needed, too… battery chargers for your camera batteries, cables, lens cloths and more. Another item I strongly recommend is gaffers tape which you can use to seal viewfinders, and lock down focus settings. And a large Ziplock bag. I also like to use a lens band (basically a large rubber band) to prevent focus or zoom settings from changing unexpectedly.

What Can Go Wrong?

Several aurora photographers wondered why I brought dew-heaters (lens warmers). These devices wrap around the end of the lens and via a power bank keep the lens warmer than the surrounding air to prevent dew (condensation) or frost from forming on the lens. Those with more experience than me typically did not use such devices because in the extreme cold dew is not typically a problem. BUT I did have complications I didn’t anticipate. In warmer, more humid climates, dew heaters can be the difference between getting a shot of “lens fog” and getting a great night shot.
The lens warmer is attached by cable to a power bank. More than once the pouch containing the power bank got bumped off my tripod yanking down on the lens ring which, unfortunately, altered either the zoom or the focus of the lens. In part for that reason I stopped using the lens warmer. But I did notice that more than once my breath crystalized on the outer lens surface. The take away here: in the extreme cold, keep your breath away from the camera as much as possible! And if you do use a lens warmer, find a secure way to attach it to your tripod so it can not yank on your lens.

From time to time I would use the viewfinder to frame my shot. But on my Sony Alpha 7R III camera, the frost from my breath condensed on the viewfinder resulting in two problems. The moist air from my breath froze on and made the viewfinder cloudy and I couldn’t see through it, and the sensor that turns off the back LCD when your eye is at the sensor got confused and refused to turn the LCD on. Effectively I was unable to use the LCD or the viewfinder to make adjustments. Fortunately this happened as the aurora was quiescing so I put my camera in a SEALABLE plastic bag, and brought it indoors.

Bag Your Camera! And Other Tips…

Why bag your camera? If you take your very cold camera indoors it will almost immediately form frost and condensation in the warmer more humid air – much like your iced drink glass forms condensation. Unfortunately condensation can occur INSIDE the lens and INSIDE the camera (e.g. on the sensor). Whenever I move the camera from a cold environment to a warmer one I bag and seal it and keep it in the bag until it has warmed to room temperature (about 1 to 3 hours). I can take it back out to a cold environment immediately if I wish. Keeping desiccant in the bag is not a bad idea, either! Oh, and you may find it advisable to remove your memory card and battery from the camera before bagging it so that you can examine the contents of the card or charge the battery while you have the bagged camera in a warmer environment.

Another unanticipated problem was that the extreme cold made the intervalometer cord quite stiff. It behaved more like a coat hanger than a wire. I strongly recommend using either a corded, or cordless intervalometer – you need it as a shutter release. The reason for the shutter release is to keep from adding any shake or wobble to the process of taking a photo – which occurs just by pressing the shutter button. A shutter release locked in “on mode” also allows you to take endless shots unattended which if you wish, you can assemble into a star trail like the photo below.

Photo 6: Applying Comet style star trails (with a satellite) (97) 6-second exposures. (each f/3.5, ISO 4000, 19mm) Total 9 min 42 secs.

Finally, I had difficulty adjusting the settings using the top dial on my camera – I believe also due to frost from my breath. I say “I believe” because it occurs to me that with my lightly gloved hand I may have been trying to rotate the function knob instead of the upper adjustment wheel. REMINDER: Get familiar with your camera before you get into the exciting environment where you may easily forget a step or two while gawking at the sky.

The Three Most Important Aurora Tips

Once you have all your gear, have a solid tripod (which you set up properly and securely) and are ready to begin photographing the amazing aurora… there are three very important things to NOT skimp on doing and double checking.

Confirm (check) focus frequently especially after any bumps or changes in zoom.
Do NOT judge the quality of the exposure by the display on the LCD. The only way to insure a good exposure is to look at the histogram (separate RGB channels is best).
Adjust your exposure as needed to meet the circumstance. Aurora can go from dim to very bright and very bright to dim. They can move hardly at all, and they can dance about in the sky at a dizzying pace. So this means not only should you pay attention to those exposures, but you might want to avoid fixating on one area of the sky.

Tip 1: Checking and Setting Focus

The best way to check focus is to shoot an image and zoom in and check for the sharpness of any stars on the LCD. The best way to get focus right is to pre-focus at infinity when there is sufficient light (e.g. using a streetlight, the moon or a very bright star). While cameras can SOMETIMES successfully self focus most of the time they cannot without bright, motionless light in the distance. One way to get a good focus is to use live view, zoom in and hand adjust focus until a star is as compact as possible. But do not stop there… TURN OFF auto focus! You can set some lenses to “MF” or “Manual Focus”, but another strategy – perhaps easier – is to set your camera to do focus only when you press a separate focus button. Typically a camera is set to focus as you press the shutter – and that’s definitely NOT what you want.
If you’re not sure where to focus, we recommend either focusing on stars or if that seems difficult, you can focus on anything that is more than 50 feet away from you and that will be sufficient for wide-angle lenses.

Then take an exposure and confirm the focus is spot on. I took a whole sequence of exposures with lovely snow flocked trees in the foreground, but I made the mistake of not confirming my focus was spot on! It is also worth noting that the aurora may be diffuse and therefore not have a clear focus point… so don’t judge by the aurora! By the way, we also strongly recommend that you set a fixed White Balance (e.g. cloudy or daylight), disable long exposure noise reduction, and turn on high ISO noise reduction.

Some cameras have a “focus peaking” setting that you can enable. Focus peaking colors those areas of the image that are in focus (red is easier to distinguish in a night shot). This tip comes from Eli Fox, and is something I did not know is present on my Sony!

One last tip, focus MAY change as the lens gets colder or warmer – so do check periodically.

Tip 2: Verify Proper Exposure using the Histogram Feature

Diagram 2: An aurora photo with over exposed elements (see red pointers). The histogram (top right) shows a spike at the right – brightest end – of the range.

My modus operandi when shooting is to hand shoot a few images doing the focus check AND a histogram check before I set the camera up to take continuous exposures. I then periodically stop the exposures to double check the histogram. One additional help here is to turn on over exposure highlighting if your camera supplies it. With that feature on, over exposed areas will generally blink where there are overexposed pixels to let you know what areas are over. Overexposure is very difficult to recover from. The goal is to minimize the overexposures but get the images as “bright” as possible to capture the most information. I then usually shoot a shot with the lens cap on (or my hand covering the lens) so I can tell that I’ve changed settings or adjusted the field of view. Elements at the “bright” end of the spectrum by themselves don’t mean there are over exposures. By the way this is also why we strongly recommend you shoot your photos in RAW – or like we do RAW plus the smallest JPEGs.

Tip 3: Do Not Fixate

This tip has two parts. Do not forget to recheck at LEAST your exposure histograms periodically, and do not fail to look around in the sky. While you might have the perfect foreground, the aurora behind you or above you may be the most spectacular thing you will ever see. If you do not get a photo, it may as well have never happened! And while we are on this subject, do you notice how GREEN the snow appears in the right side of the photo below (as well as earlier photos)? They are reflecting the predominate color (557.7 nano meters wavelength) coming from the aurora. This is one of the possible problems with obtaining natural looking aurora photos.

Photo 5: The recorded color (right) gives an eerie green, but the left is hand desaturated in post processing.

As noted in Aurora: The Bewitching Glow (part one of this series), there are other colors as well. This can have the affect of making the landscape look “eerie”. Eerie landscapse can be combatted in two ways. One way is to be thankful for and take advantage of light pollution (or some moonlight), and the other is to post process the photo to desaturate the areas that look unnatural e.g. as is done above in photo 5. All the other rules of good photo composition apply as well. If the photo would look pleasing without an aurora, then it will be even better if there is an aurora. But if the scene is chaotic or not well framed, it will take an incredibly amazing aurora to save it. I think the main take away here is: experiment with different compositions, directions and settings.

One last point. The aurora can move very slowly or surprisingly rapidly. If you take a long exposure for a fast moving aurora it will “smear”. But a dim, slow moving aurora may require a longer exposure or a higher ISO or both. Consider the examples below. At the left is an approximation of one ten second, ISO-6400 exposure (f/2.8, 18 mm) created by combining 5 2-second exposures and the second is a single 2 second exposure. The “eye” of the aurora is overexposed and much of the swirly detail is lost. However even if the ISO had been dialed down or the aperture stopped down to prevent overexposure, the capture over the longer time interval would lose some of the fine detail – in much the way that a moving flashlight or a moving camera would create a smear. But do notice that more stars are visible in the longer exposure because 10 seconds is sufficiently short for an 18mm shot that the stars themselves are not smeared (much). To understand this a bit better, the best resource we know of is
described in our article: 600 Rule ?

In fact, if you’d like to get an idea how fast an aurora CAN move in real time, here is a video sequence – not a timelapse – from Eli Fox

VIDEO: Real Time aurora used by permission from Eli Fox.

Well, that’s it for how to use a “night capable camera” to take aurora photos. But stay tuned, we have at least two more articles on the subject coming soon including:

How to Take Aurora Photos with a Cell Phone

All about Borealis Basecamp

As always, feel free to ask questions using the comments below. Thanks for the gift of your time reading this… and if you’ve found value in it, please do share the link with those you know who would appreciate it.

Cross Country – Things Learned Driving East to West (Parts 1 and 2)

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Last revised 6/14/2019

San Jose to East Coast by plane and then driving back over 15 days

If you already read this and are looking for the rest of the article (parts 3, 4 and 5)… Look HERE.

Steven’s father passed away last December and the family decided to hold a memorial in Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia on Memorial Day weekend. Seemed entirely appropriate as that is when all of dads cross-country scattered kin could convene… that and dad also served in the Army during the Korean War era. What I hope to illuminate in this article are some of the considerations to consider to take a multi-day or longer car trip. In this case, we flew to Roanoke Virginia via Chicago (the upper line) and then drove my fathers car back from Smith Mountain Lake through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and finally California.

I’ve divided the discussion into the following sections:

Trip Planning Tools (Excel and Google Maps proved to be the most useful)
Supplies and Provisions
Booking Lodging and Excursions
Photography and Night Photography Considerations
Lessons Learned (What went wrong, what went right)

Trip Planning – Google Maps + My Scenic Drives + Excel

The way I started was simple: fire up google maps, enter my beginning city, added known stops (arranged east to west) and see what happened. To travel directly from Moneta, Virginia (Smith Mountain Lake) to San Jose mapped out as 40 hours of driving over 2722 miles. Since our actual mileage was 3982, clearly we did not take the “straight path” which would have been I40 nearly the whole way. One of the limitations with Google Maps is that you can have a maximum of 10 stops – unless you’re willing to do strange unnatural acts (or create your own map). But the key here was to see what the total distance was. Next I looked at breaking the trip up into digestible bits. The goal was to NOT drive more than 8 hours total in a day. And more significantly, to not be “on the road” more than about 10 hours including stops for sightseeing meals and potty breaks. Google maps was a bit unwieldy as I added more destinations and re-routed the segments to include driving to and through places of interest. One of the nice side benefits of using Google Maps, though, is that I could pull up the map on my laptop and send it to my phone directly. The phone then served as our GPS since the 12 year old navigation system in the car was clearly out of date.

One tool that I spent a lot of time on, and certainly helped was “My Scenic Drives“. The interface is a little clunky but My Scenic Drives can automatically divide up your driving based on time, but its method is not ideal. Indeed, the best use of My Scenic Drives was to “Find Nearby Attractions”. That proved to be it’s forte. “Avenue of the Ancients?” Why yes, thank you. “Valley of the Gods?” OF COURSE!, Chaco Culture, Mesa Verde, Bisti Badlands…. nearly all of these were suggested when searching in New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. At one point I had at least 70 items “on the map” as potentials, and I paired it back to a mere 50. Reality eventually set it and I paired it back much further.

My Scenic Drives was quite useful for finding places of interest near or on the route.

I had a core list of must go places which included White Sands, NM; Monument Valley, UT; Lake Powell, AZ/UT; Lower Antelope Slot Canyons, Page, AZ; Toadstool Hoodoos, Kanab, UT; Valley of Fire State Park, NV. To that list there was a long list of LIKE-to-GOs that included Chaco Culture, Avenue of the Ancients, Mesa Verde, and many more. Since my wife traveled with me, it was also important to include stops and destinations that were of interest to her as well.

Ultimately the reality of the distances, vehicle choice and time constraints dictated what stayed in and what fell out of the plan. And THEN it got even tougher… Scheduling it on some days required to-the-HOUR timing. To be clear, not every day needed to-the-hour scheduling, but 2 of the 14 did… and that’s when I turned to creating an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet helped in a number of ways: accumulating miles (and thus predicting fuel costs and tracking lodging costs), accumulating time, and also keeping a record of addresses, reservation numbers and status… and more. The reality of one of the days made me realize that from Farmington, NM to Monument Valley, AZ, it was just not possible to go through Avenue of the Ancients AND Valley of the Gods as well. The reason: I had booked an overnight photography tour of Monument Valley and HAD to be at the View Hotel in Monument Valley by 2:30 PM or the photo tour was in jeopardy. It worked out just fine, however, as the Mrs. wanted to visit Four Corners, so we timed our Farmington, NM departure to arrive around opening time at Four Corners (a Navajo nation stop) and then budgeted time at the additional stops. Fortunately we ended up about an hour ahead of schedule on that day, and were able to take a brief detour into Valley of the Gods.

To accommodate our desired focus points, we elected to “force march” from Raleigh, NC to Amarillo, TX with no sightseeing except for one lunch stop in Omni Oak Grove in in Asheville.

That’s nearly 2/3 of the total east-west distance, and we did it in three LONG days (each less than 8.5 hours of driving, however). I micro managed the stops. The locations I picked for lodging initially were Knoxville, TN, Little Rock, AR; and Amarillo, TX. But the Little Rock to Amarillo drive was almost 9 hours, and the Knoxville to Little Rock was similarly long. There was also the matter of potential rush hour traffic, so the plan changed to drive 40 miles farther west on the first day (Harriman, TN), and about 20 miles farther west the next day (Maumelle, AR instead of Little Rock). That evened out the driving a bit more and got us away from major cities during rush hour. Mind you I still had to find cities with decent lodging. While I might be willing to stay alone in a flea bag hotel for a night, that wouldn’t fly with the Mrs. Choosing better lodging made the trip better overall, anyway!

One thing I highly recommend doing is making sure to add in an extra day or two here and there for two reasons: one is to have a cushion in case you run into delays, or find places more interesting than you expected, and the second is perhaps obvious: rest is good! No sense hauling your luggage into and out of the car twice a day every day. We elected to stay two days in Albuquerque, NM; and three days on the Pacific Coast of California – the latter came about because Las Vegas was just TOO hot to stop, and we needed some cooler “wave time”.

What I wish I had done was to pick the same “chain” of hotels as much as possible. But my strategy of not booking everything in advance proved helpful for changing plans as needed. See the Booking Lodging and Excursions (part 3) for the rationale behind each.

Maps Can Lie – BEWARE!

One last comment about using any mapping software (Google Maps, for example), is to inspect the path carefully. I’ve seen mapping software make bone-headed decisions. On the planning for this trip, for example, it routed us over about 50 miles of dirt-road driving until I forced it to pick a different route by adding intermediate destinations. Once in California, the mapping software assumed that the East Pinnacles National Park and West Pinnacles National park were connected by a road – but they AREN’T. The best you could have done is carry your car about 3 miles over a foot path… And of course there are many examples where people have relied on outdated maps of places like Death Valley and ended up in a heap of hurt.

Supplies and Provisions

Because we were flying from the West Coast to the East Coast, we couldn’t possibly take all the provisions we would want on the plane. Some of the things that just were impractical to take included:

A cooler for drinks (plus snacks and ice)
A tow strap (in case we got stuck in sand or mud somewhere)
Bits of carpet for traction
Jump Start cables & jump start battery
Keurig Cartridges
Supplies, blanket / pillow
Gallon or more of water
Quart of the proper oil
Gallon of Bug / Windshield cleaner

And despite my normal camera-bag-full of equpiment (2 cameras, lenses, two tripods, etc), I elected to take ONE camera – the Nikon D600 – and ONE lens (24mm manual focus), and one tripod. I also took my Mavic Drone, but was only able to use it once… most locations prohibited drones, the wind was excessive in other locations, and a complication with the software made it impossible to use in one area that I wanted to use it… more on that in the Photography and Night Photography Considerations chapter.

My father’s car is an older model Lexus and so it wouldn’t be suitable for going down the bumpy off road areas where I might take an AWD high clearance vehicle like my Subaru. I also knew that some of the destinations included driving on unpaved roads. Indeed, some of the destinations that we removed from our itinerary were removed because of the off-road driving required. Since we clearly couldn’t take all needed provisions on the plane with us, and it was not clear that we would be able to acquire all that we desired, I used Amazon to order and have shipped to my father’s house the hard-to-find supplies that I needed. We figured we could pick up a cooler, snacks and drinks, water, oil and windshield cleaner along the way. Indeed, after we noticed that the first two lodgings had in-room Keurig machines, we bought Chai and Pete’s coffee cartridges. I am a Chai drinker, and my wife is a coffee snob. Only about 40% of the places we stayed had such machines, but when they had them, it meant we could enjoy our normal morning and evening beverages.

In Case of Emergency

For our peace of mind, I purchased and activated a plan on a Garmin InReach mini. I had the device shipped to my home before we left so that I could make sure it worked, and the service was active. The Inreach mini is a portable satellite communication device that can be used to track your location –

indeed that device supplied the tracking information for the map presented at the top. One of the plans allows you to track your location every 10 minutes – you can see I turned on tracking somewhere over Nevada on our flight out. The mini can also be used like the SPOT emergency location device to send 3 different canned messages to pre-canned destinations. The mini is about twice the cost, but it’s bi-directional. The messages I chose were: All is well, just checking in when arriving at lodging for the night; Look what I found to mark a particularly interesting place for posterity; and Delayed, or rerouted to indicate we were fine, but not going to arrive as planned. The device also allows an SOS to be sent, and you can then communicate by text with the emergency personnel to indicate what your needs are, and they can text you to indicate their status. Fortunately we had no need of sending an SOS, but there were many areas where we had little and NO cell coverage on either Verizon or ATT (my wife and I have different plans on purpose), so the peace of mind was worth the about $50 of service… and no doubt I’ll use the $300 device in the future.

Enroute Planning

**Strorms Ahead**. (Actually the blue is from shooting through the screen in the top of the windshield ;-), but it did dump a heap of rain and hail on us just a bit father down the road in Oklahoma.

It wasn’t enough, of course, to merely plot out the path. We also had to be mindful of the weather and road conditions. I’ve written extensively about how I >> plan for weather << so visit that link to learn how I use Weather.gov to be aware of what is going on. On this particular trip, we drove through the middle of the country prior to and during tornado and flooding events. Without the maps, we might have ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. As it was, a tornado struck 1 mile away from our path two days prior to arriving (El Reno, Oklahoma) and major flooding was experienced in Little Rock and Fort Smith, AK the days of and following our trip segments there. Amarillo, TX and Roswell, NM were also hit with violent thunderstorms, and we used the forecast to refrain from heading up into Santa Fe, NM due to severe storm warnings. One Android tool I picked up and used was the NOAA Radar app. That offered alerts about nearby events – it was worth one month of subscription at $3 just to get those!

One of the other things that I discovered, but wasn’t aware of is that Google Maps in addition to notifications of slowdowns and road construction also has notifications about speed (radar) traps. We weren’t speeding anywhere, but the heads up certainly came in handy in case we decided to “blow the doors off a slowpoke driver” at an inopportune time.

Keeping Cool

Sugar free beverage + excellent “ice bottle”

We did acquire a decent cooler, small enough to fit in the backseat, but with a velcro latch so that it would be easy to open while underway. It had to be spacious enough to hold a half dozen drinks, ice AND chocolate. Since it was quite hot during our trip, even a short stint with the A/C off would result in a choco melt-down. I employed a trick I often use when hiking. After finishing an Ice beverage (sparkling sweetened drink), I rinsed it and refilled it with tap water. In lodgings that had a freezer component of the mini fridge, I put the refilled bottles in the freezer. Those frozen bottles then served as ice, and in a pinch, cold drinking water on some of our hot hikes. Do not try this with your average bottled water, however, they are too thin and flimsy to stand up to freezing.

It is also a good idea to buy a one or two gallon bottle of water that you can use for drinking (when the tap water is sketchy), and as an emergency source of coolant should your car need it.

See The Rest of the Article!

>>> Click here for parts 3, 4, and 5 along with many photos! You’re also welcome to use my excel planning sheet for yourself. The sheet contains links to the maps I used (divided into daily segments), a TODO list, as well as a heap of web references I used to select the events and locations I visited.

Planispheres (Star Maps): Paper or Electronic?

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Published May 29, 2014
Last Updated April 18, 2016

A topic that comes up a lot is discussion about what makes a good astronomy helper application. Whenever we suggest purchasing a paper Planisphere our critics remind us that they are not necessary because “there is a great app” to do that.

We take exception to the “there is an app for that” assertion… but perhaps not for the obvious reason. In fact we DO use several apps for forecasting and navigating the night sky. But ultimately we find the good old fashioned planisphere to be the most effective for most of what we want to do. We’ll make the case for a paper (or plastic) planisphere in a moment.

Why Do We Want Something Besides our Eyes?

Let’s start with determining why we want something to help us with our night sky navigation. Some scenarios to consider include:

We are a beginner and we really don’t know Canis Major from Major Appliances.
We have some familiarity with some of the constellations, but we want to learn more.
We want to take a shot with a particular sky object behind a particular landmark.
Even though we know the night sky pretty well, we still need to be able to find faint objects, or find objects in less than dark skies – the Milky Way, for example is difficult to see unless conditions are good and the sky is dark.
We are going to go to an unfamiliar place with a latitude that is very different from where we normally gaze at the night sky.
We want to know where to look to observe a particular phenomenon like the Geminid Meteor shower.

Can’t I Do that with an App?

It might seem that and android, iPad or iPhone app is the best tool since you can take it with you. And that MIGHT be right except for the following significant problems:

Unless you keep the app brightness really low or use it in a “dark sky mode” (usually dim red), you’ll damage your night vision making it difficult or impossible to see dimmer objects in the night sky.
If you’re trying to find the Milky Way (the dense part in Sagittarius) but you try to use the app during a period when the Milky Way is not visible. No matter what time of night you enter, you won’t see the Milky Way (e.g. November through January).
The representation on the app is often NOTHING like what it may look to your eye in your location. Every app suffers from this problem in one way or another. Some apps make the Milky Way in Canis Major appear to be incredulous – actually its very sedate there.
You want an idea when it will be BEST to get the Milky Way aligned over your target. But on an App you will need to determine the time manually.
If you mistakenly trust the app to tell you where it’s pointing you may be surprised how wrong it can be. Due to iPhone, Android, and iPad hardware limitations, a handheld app could be anywhere from close enough to off by 180 degrees! It will be even worse if for some reason your App is configured for the wrong timezone, or the wrong GPS location.
True story 1: I happened on a family in Yosemite, California and the dad had out his iPad pointing out to his children: “see … there is Orion”.. and over there…” but he was from Alabama and his iPad was off by 3 hours – and his compass wasn’t calibrated either so he ended up almost 180 degrees off.
Dead battery. If you have to choose between enough battery to make an emergency call or figuring out your night sky… well, we recommend saving the battery.
Most apps show only a fractional portion of the sky which may confuse anyone who is not already familiar with the sky.

While we freely admit that we like and use the following applications, we prefer a paper/plastic Planisphere.

Stellarium – FREE runs on Mac, PC and Linux. We like it because it has excellent sky condition simulations that help give a realistic view of the night sky. It won’t show you dim stars under bright moonlight unless you ask it to. It can also track comets and satellites. What we don’t like is that it is fidgety to configure.
StarMap by Fredd software for the iPhone/iPad. We like this one because it’s quite complete. It is well organized to show you, for example, what meteor showers are visible, what “dimmer” objects you can find, and has a simple interface for adjusting the sky brightness or the time of day. What we don’t like: we like to call the constellations by their scientific (and we believe) more common names. Herdsman? That’s Bootes. Big Dog? That’s Canis Major, thank you. Note there are TWO versions of this App, unless you’re a serious astronomer, the less expensive one will work.
GoSkyWatch – admittedly we like it because we got it as a free app through Starbucks app of the week but we think its worth the price anyway! We like that it’s pretty versatile, when you point it at the sky it gives the altitude and azimuth (elevation angle and compass direction) which can come in quite handy – even though as we’ve already noted the compass direction is probably wrong! Zero in on an object and it will give you and idea what it looks like. We like that it’s Milky Way representation – while overly bright is pretty close to what it looks like. You won’t confuse Canis Major with Sagittarius, for example. It also includes a great assortment of dim objects and shows constellations with “good names” not just the “common name”. It also has a night mode to conserve your night vision. It doesn’t have meteor showers or satellites, however.

What We Don’t Like

We’re not fond of anything we haven’t listed. Not that there aren’t better apps, but every one we’ve tried falls short in some way. Take for example, SkySafari.

SkySafari for example, is mostly a disappointment. Not only are there 12 different versions for iOS that range in price from $1 to $40, but the app doesn’t do a good job simulating the night sky, prefers to show useless images of the mythological constellations (which fortunately can be turned off) and shows a garish orange Milky Way which might be exciting to look at except that it will never look like what the app reveals. SkySafari also doesn’t adjust for the effects of twilight or moonlight.

SkySafari does have some nice information about each object in its database, but the database is not searchable. If you’re interested, for example in M101 you’ll have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the Messier Catalog page. If you want to catch a glimpse of the ISS (Zarya/Space Station) you’ll have to slog through the Satellites page.

Why We Like the Planisphere

In this day and age it’s pretty normal for people to navigate by GPS, not by map or even by written instructions. It’s convenient to rely on devices. But we have driven to places and had NO idea how we got there except that “Mr. Carson” – our pet name for our British Accented “voice” – told us where to turn. In other words, we accomplished the goal of getting somewhere, but not really learning the geography, or even getting a good sense of direction. And we trust our GPS at a potential cost: the instructions could be WRONG, or dangerous, and our device might die. True story 2: we accidentally wiped our handheld GPS track when our goal was to return through a heavily fogged in trail at night – depriving us of the very bit of information that we needed! We lived, obviously, but took several wrong turns as a result.

First we like the Planisphere because it is indeed a Map.

You can study the Planisphere day or night and observe what constellations are near other constellations. A planisphere is in fact a rotating map. Unlike directions to grandma’s house, the appearance of the night sky changes minute by minute and season by season because of the earth’s rotation and the earths path around the sun. While you know you can always turn left to get to grandma’s house, what you want to find in the night sky may in fact be “upside down” from what you remember 3 months or six hours ago.

From a larger map like a Planisphere you’ll discover that lining up Rigel to Betelgeuse (in Orion) and keeping straight will get you to Castor and Pollux in Gemini. Following Orion’s “belt stars” toward the Rigel side will get you to Taurus and from there if you keeping going you’ll find the Pleiades… and so on. You’ll learn that you can navigate to the stars WITH the stars.

A Planisphere is also a Chart of Dates

A Planisphere also has a very powerful do-it-once approach to aligning things in the night sky. Spin the wheel to the sky configuration you wish and you can read around the edges every time of night over about 5 months in which the sky will appear in the same configuration! No app we’ve seen does that! In fact, we use the Planisphere to decide when the Milky Way will appear over our favorite waterfall or when Andromeda will be high in the night sky so we can snap it’s picture with the minimum amount of atmospheric distortion. The planisphere doesn’t tell us about the moon, but it does give us all the dates we have to work with.

Planispheres are Hard to Misconfigure

An app must have the correct location and timezone – which you may have noticed in True Story 1 can easily be quite wrong, a Planisphere is based on your local time. The only parameter you have to get right is to match your latitude with the proper Planisphere chart. If you live in San Francisco, you’ll want a chart that is valid from 30-40 degrees, not one that is 40-50 degrees and thus more suitable to Seattle residents. The most often made mistake on a Planisphere is to not subtract an hour from the time shown on the chart during daylight savings time. Some charts have the daylight savings time equivalent printed on them, but if not, just remember that during the summer if the watch reads 9 PM, you dial the chart to 8 PM. The universe does not suddenly lurch 15 degrees when we decide to artificially set the time ahead an hour!

The one unfortunate thing about planispheres is that not all are created equal. We prefer DH Chandler’s LARGE charts because they are double sided and have less distortion than the single-sided charts. While it might be counter-intuitive to create a chart of black dots on a white background to represent the stars, it’s actually easier to read at night with a red flashlight than a chart with white stars on a black background. You can get DH Chandler’s charts from Amazon for about $13 and from many other retailers. If you join us for any of our events, we always have a supply on hand for our students.