Pine Cones in Tree

Pine cones - the life giver to a future generation of pine trees. The pine cones in this photograph were very close to where I live near Phoenix, Arizona. Actually, they were in one of the trees in my neighbor's yard behind my house. This was the first time I had the EOS 20D attached to my telescope and I was trying to take some photographs of the sun through it, but was foiled by clouds. So instead, I took some photographs of a chimney and parts of a tree that my telescope can see from its' mount in my observatory.

I took this photograph with my Canon EOS 20D digital camera attached to the focuser of my homemade Lurie-Houghton telescope that is on a Losmandy G-11 equatorial mount in my JaZ Observatory. Since the pine cones were only about 15 to 20 feet away, I had to stack two extension tubes together to get the telescope to focus close enough. The exposure was 1/100 second with the camera set for ISO 100 in RAW mode. The lens was my telescope that has a focal length of 1154mm and a focal ratio of f/4.63. Adobe Photoshop CS was used to perform the RAW conversion and image processing. Photograph by Rick Scott.

Updated: 30 December 2004