Waaaaay out of practice! First iridium flare in a long, LONG time

Iridium flares are something I used to play around with quite a bit. The key words here are "used to". I am so out of practice it's not funny and tonight proved it. Cailyn and I headed out to Lake Mary to shoot a -3 magnitude flare. I couldn't find the compass so I used the Magellan hand held GPS. This is an older model and doesn't refresh fast enough to my liking. The flare was 125­° SE at 47°. Well, the first issue was getting to 125 since the dumb GPS would jump from 105 over to 130. Guesstimation time. The altitude is always easy around 45° since it is half was from the horizon to straight up overhead. Cailyn and took a couple of practice shots to make sure ISO 200 @ f6.3 and 25s would get the job done. Ready, set (counting down to 20:04:27)...crap. The clock on the GPS was also off by about 5 seconds as I hit the shutter button at what I thought was 20:04:22...it was more like 26 as you can see by the shot.



I really felt like I was fumbling through the whole thing tonight. Next time...(and I'll use my cable release!)