Pictures requested by popular demand of planes in Groom and the NTS

reply to post by Zaphod58


Assuming you go Canon EOS, the 400mm f5.6 will do the job just nicely. Don't get the zoom 100-400. People don't realize that zoom lenses are not very sharp. Handy of course, but not good to get that last bit of detail.

The other trick is to kill some of the blue cast that you get with long distance photography. There are a few choices, but most warming filters will do the trick. While in theory you can fix a color cast in post, the idea is to get the balance correct on the sensor itself. The cast sets the exposure, and often the shadow areas are lost in the process without filtering.

Tikaboo requires a telescope, preferably an APO or ED refractor, plus a barlow. Filtering is more critical for Tikaboo shots. You need a real UV filter at 400nm to kill the cast, in addition to the kr1.5. The scope needs a gear head.

Send me a U2U if you are interested in learning more.

These "meetings" in the desert nearly never happen. Your best bet is just to go out there. You can climb Tikaboo with just a GPS plus observing the markings. For the occasional trip, it is sufficient just to tell someone you are climbing the peak and if they don't hear from you, send in the search party.

Phone service on Tikaboo is Verizon only (unless AT&T finally turned on that Alamo tower). Even the Verizon service is poor. You can easily hit the ham repeaters on Angel Peak. If you head out there a lot, a few of us have satellite messengers or phones. Iridium is the preferred network. I'm sure the base tracks satellite signals, but then again, they track people too.

Back before wifi was invented, people would use the public PCs in the Alamo library to reach the outside world. I took the step the clear my browser history, then on a whim, decided to see if it was actually cleared. Nope. From that point on I learned how to do internet over CDMA, back when that actually took work. Today you can get wifi in Alamo and send your message that you made it down in one piece. They have wifi at Windmill Ridge and that Mexican restaurant in "downtown" Alamo, as well as at the Little AleInn (password protected). At one time there was a payphone outside the Little Aleinn and even at the Warm Springs defunct bar. You could use a calling card. Both are now history.

The Windmill Ridge wifi is pretty poorly implemented. They insists on having a guest wifi and office wifi, and not on the same router (something you can do with DD-WRT). Often the routers end up on the same channel and nothing works. Alamo isn't exactly the kind of town where you will find a computer geek.

reply to post by gariac


I have a HDC-SD900 High Definition camera and I can record some object from 40km without any problems. Consider the desert air. At this distance it's good to have a tripod. Also very important is UV filter which minimizes excess ultraviolet, then the image is little brighter and have more realistic colors. When I didn't have it sky on records was slightly purple...

reply to post by GroomLakePolishFAN


What's the optical zoom on that camera? I can only find the specs for something called intelligent zoom which is 20x so I'd say probably half of that would be digital zoom which is terrible. So if you've got say a 10x zoom that would give you a focal length of 460mm but I'm not sure if video cameras have a crop factor or not. 460mm sounds pretty good but if you compared it to an Eos with a prime lens then it would be blown out of the water quality wise as the longer side of a point and shoot camera is not very sharp.

reply to post by GroomLakePolishFAN

Daily double.

reply to post by Stealthbomber


Here is full specification of this camera from Panasonic official website. When I was at the seaside I could record a ship which sail through Baltic Sea without any problems, of course the quality on optical zoom is the best when you need to use digital zoom quality deteriorates very fast. This model(I'm not sure if it's still in production) was the best for that class in 2011, and it coast about 829,66 EUR. On the youtube you can see some test recordings from this device. It also having HYBRID O.I.S. which is wonderful. If your hand shaking it's very good for you. This is my third camera which I still recording and I don't regret fact that I bought it.

Movie
Movie 2

if you have any questions, ask with confidence.

reply to post by GroomLakePolishFAN


Basically what digital zoom does is just keep cropping in on the maximum level your optics will go which is why it's crap, like if you zoom in too far on a picture on your computer how it becomes pixelated. Are those YouTube movies your own? The comment about bordering being illegal but informative was a pretty funny one

reply to post by Stealthbomber


No, it's not my movies. I uploaded to YouTube only videos with the topic of aviation and motorsport.

reply to post by GroomLakePolishFAN


Okay fair enough good luck with the research.

I can photograph the moon with my smartphone. However the telescope does a better job.

For Groom Lake, there is no camera with attached optics that is adequate for photographing the base. I use an equivalent of a bit over 2000mm. This is done combining a refractor telescope with a barlow. You can substitute eyepiece projection for the barlow, though I found the barlow to be sharper.

Note also that most "UV" filters don't filter much UV. You can easily demonstrate this with a UV flashlight and anything that will glow under UV light. I use an Andover 400mm long pass filter combined with a KR1.5. [The haze is inversely proportional to the 4th power of the wavelength, so filtering a little bit of the short wavelength light greatly improves the contrast.]

With decent optics, you can resolve telephone poles at Groom Lake from 26 miles away. The telescope has 1.5 arcsecond resolution, but rarely does the atmosphere cooperate. But resolution is a crude measurement. What you really want to know is the modulation transfer function. Telescopes tend to be very simple, usually a doublet or triplet. Camera lens tend to be complicated since they try to achieve a flat field (uniform light) across the field of view as well as minimal distortion. So a camera lens will have a worse modulation transfer function than a telescope. But the telescope needs more processing in post. I don't bother fixing geometric distortion, but I do field flatten the image.

Much of what you see on a good Groom Lake panorama can be attributed to processing. Dynamics have to be expanded else the image will look very flat. I use "a trous" wavelet sharpening.

reply to post by gariac


I actually found a cheap lens kit with a 1600mm lens in it that I'll probably end up getting. It's not a top of the line Canon lens, but it should do nicely.

reply to post by gariac


Yes, you are right. Telephoto lenses are better of course, but when I was writting my post I though that High Definition camera can be use for that distance.

reply to post by Zaphod58


A cheap 1600mm lens? I've never seen one lol is it a prime with a teleconverter or a telescope? Otherwise a 1600mm lens is incredibly expensive, Leica made one last year and it costs around 2 million

Unless its the Bigma (sigma 150-500) with a teleconverter and your crop factor it may be somewhere in the range (around 1400mm)

reply to post by Stealthbomber


I suspect a "cat" with 2x teleconverter.
cat lens

So you get 800mm of folded optics plus a 2x barlow. The thing with barlows is the front otpics has to be very very very very good, and that will not be the case with a cheap catadioptric. Worse yet, you are starting at f8 for the 800mm. You lose two stops with the 2x barlow. This is not the kind of lens you are going to focus on the fly. Further, you will need a shutter speed of 1/1600 or less, which means you really need to crank up the ISO, which in turn means a lot of noise.

One problem with folded optics is you get air circulating in the chambers of the lens. This is not a big deal in a telescope since you are using it at night. You just let the thing stabilize. But for daytime use, the circulating air causes blur. I used to use a "Mak" to photograph from Tikaboo. The temperature in the early morning made the thing keep shifting focus. Really annoying. A refractor lens is so much better, well except for weight.

The canon I suggested is not top of the line. It is the cheapest "red ringer". [Canon L series lenses have a red ring on the hood.] This lens used sells for what I paid for it new 15 years ago. I'm using it on my 3rd canon body. Personally, that sounds like a cheap lens to me. ;-)

It might pay just to rent a lens.
Borrow Lenses

Depending where you live, you might be able to rent a lens locally.

Boomer you wrote that some classified types were flying out of Groom in early 2000s during daylight hours. What happened if they(Groom) knows that there are some people on the way to Tikaboo? If they hide an aircraft in hangar quickly or ignore it? Were there such cases in early 2000s?

Originally posted by GroomLakePolishFAN
Boomer you wrote that some classified types were flying out of Groom in early 2000s during daylight hours. What happened if they(Groom) knows that there are some people on the way to Tikaboo? If they hide an aircraft in hangar quickly or ignore it? Were there such cases in early 2000s?

I suspect that if they knew people were at tikaboo they wouldnt fly the aircraft. But I cant answer any of those questions cause I just dont know

Maybe I badly expressed in my previous post. I thought that what Groom would be do if the sensitive project was on the runway when they saw that on the way to Tikaboo are people.

Okey Boomer, thanks for any kind of answers

reply to post by boomer135


The base will fly test aircraft at night when there is no moon, even if there are people on Tikaboo. I saw a test, and one of those stupid Area 51 documentaries captured a test on video. They just screwed it up by concentrating on a common meteor that occurred at the same time.


The base goes black so you don't have light from the base illuminating the test article. My recollection was it didn't go entirely black, but much of the lighting went off.

Every time I watch this video, I cringe at the stupid commentary.

sorry for this kind of question in this topic but İ cant find other to ask about that.

Boomer, did you ever refuel something aircraft over Poland area?

reply to post by GroomLakePolishFAN



No never flew that way