Orion the Hunter

Last Saturday morning I couldn’t sleep. We had gone to bed early the previous night, not long after sundown. We had tried to get in at Turkey Run State Park, but that campground was full. Later we met a family who were camping there and they claimed that it filled up last March.  We ended up camping at Rockville Lake Park, where we had originally planned on staying. As I said, we went to bed early, but did not get to sleep until much later. Rockville Lake Park is located just outside of Rockville, the county seat of Parke County, IN. Part of the reason that we could not get to sleep was, because we could plainly hear the PA system from that night’s high school homecoming game, which was across town. Other noise came from the small two lane country road that ran across the bottom of the lake’s dam. I think that a lot of that noise came from the hundreds of visiting ATVs that were also in town last weekend. We saw many of these people the next day, they seemed nice, but they were also awfully noisy. The third source of noise were the pickup trucks that also seemed to stream by our campsite interminably. We had picked a site overlooking the lake, swimming area, picnic area and boat ramp, basically all of the fun places in the park. I guess that it is natural to expect that these attractions also attract nuisances.

Early to bed means early to rise, especially if your sleeping on an air mattress. It was still an hour before dawn when I couldn’t sleep anymore. When I got out of the tent, I was greeted by a beautiful starry night. I snapped the picture with this post, along with a bunch more. I used a Canon SX-40, which is basically a point and shoot, albeit with a 35X zoom. Mounted on a tripod, I was able to take this photo. Interestingly, Betelgeuse, the star in the upper righthand corner has a reddish tinge that is because it is a red giant. Also, in Orion’s belt is Orion’s Nebula. If you click on the photo thus zooming in, you might notice that the nebula is ever so slightly more blurry than the other stars. All of the stars are streaked a bit, because I used a 15 second  exposure.