Category Archives: Night Sky Photography

Franconia Aurora

Posted on by
The moon sets behind an outdoor sculpture while auroras light the sky at Franconia Sculpture Park.

Even if light pollution were not an issue, we’d rarely see the northern lights because our latitude in Minneapolis is outside the normal auroral oval.  But last week, Earth experienced a strong geomagnetic storm and we were suddenly in the middle of it!  Here was a chance to see aurora without traveling to Alaska or Manitoba! And it was the perfect opportunity to photograph them with my wide-angle lenses, one of which I call my “Milky Way/aurora lens”, a 2-1/2-pound monster for just this purpose! But we needed to get away from the city lights.

There is a sculpture park, Franconia, that Poldi and I have enjoyed and contributed to for many years, and it was less than an hour from home. We arrived before sunset and sought permission to take photos, even after the normal park closing time. As I was scouting for locations and setting up tripods, a trickle of other visitors arrived with the same purpose: to see the predicted northern lights. As twilight faded, the aurora tourists expanded to dozens of vehicles, all of which had headlights that swept across the sculpture park grounds, interfering with my carefully selected compositions.

I have learned not to react to unexpected lighting situations. Oftentimes, they make for interesting photographic results. One of my favorite examples is when I was shooting reflections on a calm alpine lake and a group of partiers arrived and went skinnydipping, breaking up the smooth lake surface. Rather than close the shutter and move on, I kept it open for the duration of my planned exposure. It created a wonderful blend of reflected and scattered light!

Continue reading →

Eclipse Party 2024 – photo planning

Posted on by
Eclipse photography dress rehearsal in my back yard.

While Poldi was preparing food-for-the-masses, I was preparing other things. The big attraction the eclipse held for me was its rare opportunity to capture unique photos of the sun.

In 2017 I had participated in “The Modern Eddington Experiment“, trying to photograph the nearby stars to see if they were deflected by the sun’s gravity as Einstein predicted. My results were inconclusive, but I really enjoyed the challenge of getting the pictures and analyzing the results afterward.

This year I registered to contribute to the Eclipse Mega Movie, a less complex project but one that matched my desire to capture the corona, which as we near the peak of the solar cycle should be even larger than it was in 2017.

To do this, I needed to precisely control the camera during totality. As often occurs with our rapidly evolving technology, much has changed in the seven years since 2017. I had a new camera and a new computer, several hardware and software versions later than my previous eclipse session. The software application I had used before had become obsolete, no longer able to run on the new laptop and operating system. The author had not migrated it to the latest platform.

Fortunately, a new program had been created that could fill its role– it had fewer features but was entirely adequate for what I wanted to do. I was pleased to discover it.

Continue reading →

The Rock with Wings

Posted on by
Blending all the frames of the time lapse reveals the star trails above Shiprock (click for full size)

Many of my photographic ventures are purely serendipitous.  Yes, it is important to be at the right place, or the right time, and sometimes both, but there are so many things that can go wrong and prevent the shot that you were planning.  But there are also many things that can happen that are unexpectedly magnificent.  If you have a camera ready and waiting – even for something else—you can capture the unexpected event.

This describes my attitude when setting up a camera for a long nighttime shoot.  Lately, I have been exploring timelapse photography, making exposures every few seconds and then creating a motion picture (mp4 video) from them.  When traveling alone with no fixed plans, I like to head to photogenic landscapes where the skies are clear.  But a joint road trip itinerary with lodging reservations does not permit this flexibility, and I often encounter overcast skies.  I accept this as just one of those challenges to the practitioners of this arcane hobby.

And so, when our homeward-bound trip from a Thanksgiving in Los Angeles took us through New Mexico, and the day’s route ended near Shiprock, a city named for the nearby geologic feature that the Navaho call the “Rock with Wings”, our plans shifted to take advantage of the unexpectedly clear skies.  Although exhausted from a long day on the road, I left the comfort of a cozy Airbnb apartment to go set up cameras in the desert and wait in the cold for hours, hoping to capture something interesting.

Continue reading →

Texas Road Trip: Lunar Eclipse

Posted on by
My cameras at work!

I started to set up for the lunar eclipse; it would occur tonight (this was not a drill)!  But by the time I had the tripods and mount in place, I realized that I had left a critical piece of equipment behind—my camp chair.  I left the stuff for a 10-minute trip back to the campsite to retrieve it.

On return, I found the other guy who had obtained a pass for the overlook (required if we wanted to stay past 10:00 pm).  He was an interesting person who was ok with my being focused on setting up rather than chatting. 

A few other visitors dropped by, including one who was on foot with some portable camera gear.  After a while he decided he wanted a different viewpoint and so he hiked away, disappearing below the crest. 

I was ready at moonrise.  This time I could see the moon as it appeared on the horizon.  I centered it in the cameras, started the tracking and started taking pictures.  The moon rose in a light orange color, brightening to white and then about one-half hour later, the eclipse began.

Continue reading →

Manitoba Nights

Posted on by
Aurora in the fog. Photo by Eric Persson.

I recently spent a week In our neighbor to the north, specifically the Canadian province of Manitoba.  We had booked a trip with friends to a remote lodge nearly a year prior, and we were finally there!  The travel brochures promised spectacular scenery and wildlife, interesting geology, world class fishing, and northern lights.  I wasn’t all that interested in fishing, but I’m always interested in the other items on that list. (And the fishing turned out to be a highlight!)

Continue reading →

Aurora!

Posted on by

One of the attractions of the Salmonberry tour in Fairbanks was the opportunity to see the northern lights.  Fairbanks is well-positioned with respect to the auroral oval so that on most evenings, if the sky is clear, one can see them.  And we were there at the vernal equinox– spring:  the weather was moderating, meaning that the daytime temps were approaching melting and at night they kept mostly above zero.  At this high latitude however, the days are lengthening rapidly, and in a few more weeks, there won’t be much night left to see northern lights.

It was nice that the tour was focused on aurora viewing.  There is always uncertainty: the aurora is not active every night, and clouds frequently obscure them when they are.  To maximize the chance that we would see some northern lights sometime during the tour, three nights were scheduled for such viewing.  Each took us to a viewing site away from the lights of Fairbanks and accommodated the needs of aurora viewers:  a warming house, coffee and snacks, and alternate activities in the event of poor viewing.  Oh, and a wifi connection so we could monitor the online real-time aurora activity reports being fed by satellites and observers on the ground. 

Continue reading →

“Coffee Table Nightscapes” goes to print!

Posted on by

I finally caught up with my blog postings of past nightscape photos to reach the ones I made this last year. And I have now completed their assembly into a printed photo book.

I didn’t realize when I started this project that the pictures would span 25 years, and that they happened to straddle the transition from film photography to digital. The chronological order reveals the change in technology as I pursued my various night sky targets.

For completeness, I posted the preface and introduction as blog entries, but their real place is in the leading pages of the printed book where all the photos are collected under one cover. I was pleased to be able to give copies of it to my family and close friends this holiday season. Not all of them have coffee tables, but I hope they find a place for it.

Although this marks the end of this particular project, I doubt that I am really done. As mentioned in the epilogue, the capabilities of cameras just keep improving and so I am now excited to start the next 25 years of taking pictures of the night sky!

Milky Way Sails the Playa

Posted on by

Racetrack Playa is a dry lakebed in Death Valley.  It is a vast expanse, miles by miles, of dried mud cracks.  It is flat and nearly level, the north end merely inches higher than the south.  The occasional stone can be found on the playa, delivered by erosion forces on the surrounding mountains, falling down and rolling out onto the lakebed.  They are stones, not boulders, maybe a foot or two across, heavier than is convenient to carry away, but not heavy enough to protect them from magic seekers.

And the magic they seek is that many of the stones are found at the end of a long, physically engraved trail, recording their traversal of the ancient lakebed.  How could these stones have moved across the dry playa?  It has been a mystery to geologists for years.  Various theories have been proposed, and some have been tested, but it is a difficult research project.  The stones lie inert for years, and then, when next inspected, they have moved.  With new trails marking their path!  This is the magic that the stone thieves are after.

Continue reading →

Polaris on the Playa

Posted on by

One of the active topics in modern photography is the distinction between “blends” (combining multiple exposures from a single camera viewpoint), and “composites” (which combine unrelated images into a synthetic scene).  Both are valid uses of photography, but I prefer to limit my efforts to the former, hoping to reveal some scientific beauty in the result.

In this case the relative motion of the stars is “stacked” (added) from 2,335 10-second exposures.  Each frame looks like a normal picture of the sky, but when accumulated creates the star trail effect.  The frames were selected from the period after “astronomical twilight” when the sun is more than 18-degrees below the horizon.  On this date, official night lasted over six hours, and the star trails cover more than 1/4 of a full circle (and even Polaris shows that it is not exactly on the north celestial pole).

Although it was “night”, it was not completely dark.  The moon was up and illuminated the scene until it set around midnight.  This allows the foreground to show, including the “sailing stone” with its path on the dry lakebed trailing behind it, a contrast of time scales against the motion of the sky.

A final detail to explain:  the streaks below and to the left are the result of trains of Starlink satellites moving across the sky.  Dozens of satellites follow each other into and out of the sunlight at their altitude, reflecting it down to our observing position on the playa and creating its own trail on this image.

For more of the backstory on making this image and the next, see “A Night on the Playa – Part 2“.

View full size.

19 May 2021
Racetrack Playa
Death Valley National Park CA
Canon EOS Ra with EFS 10-22mm
2335 exposures, 8 sec @ f/4, ISO 3200 (6-1/2 hours)

previous | nightscapes index | next

Wupatki Startrails

Posted on by

“The Citadel” remains the focus for this startrail image.  The moon dominates the scene, and this blend of exposures shows its path among the stars.

The cloud persisted above the monument over the course of the exposure, growing and shrinking, but never moving away or evaporating.

View full size.

15 May 2021
Wupatki National Monument
Flagstaff AZ
Canon EOS 6D with Sigma 14mm f/1.8
458 exposures, 8 sec @ f/2, ISO 3200 (76 minutes)

previous | nightscapes index | next