The stars follow their gradual southern arcs parallel to the terrain during this 90 minute exposure. The water is unusually high this season, catching and reflecting starlight during its freefall down to the valley floor, the long exposure creating a flowing river of mist not possible to capture during the bright daylight hours.
Spring comes late to this region. Snow was an obstacle to bringing equipment to this site, but once there, I could enjoy a solitude that amplified the sounds of the great lake. The beating of waves against the shore diminished through the evening as the temperature dropped and the water in this back bay was held captive and quiet beneath a thin ice glaze. Occasional cracks and “tinks” were heard as daytime puddles froze in their rock bowls.
This time exposure captures the stars traversing their east-west passage over the recently thawed waters of Lake Superior. Park security lamps are now the only light on the famous cliff, illuminating the distinctive shape of this former, but now dark, guardian beacon.
I had tried once before to get a nighttime picture of these modern-day generators, to complement my shot of a more traditional windmill. The proximity to the large population near San Francisco Bay fills the sky with light, and my previous pictures had been washed out. This time I was armed with a light pollution rejection filter and enough time to find this interesting composition. I rediscovered a characteristic of these filters- they are very angle-of-view sensitive.
El Capitan’s immense figure blocks my view of the north star Polaris. I can only guess where it should be based on the time and positions of other stars. A position in an open field in Yosemite Valley allows me to make this composition.
The moonless night meant that the only illumination was by starlight. The park is sufficiently remote to escape the light pollution from large cities, but not enough to avoid airplane traffic. The distinct dotted lines mark the strobe lights of distant flights, unknowingly adding their trails to those of the stars.
Yosemite National Park, 13 April 2002 Pentax 67 w 55mm lens at f/4, 2 hour exposure on Provia 400
I was given a hint that I should consider Yosemite Falls as a startrail target because the trail to it ran along a north-south path. I wasn’t brave enough to hike in the dark, but I did find a vantage point from across the valley that placed Polaris directly above the falls.
The moonless night meant that the only illumination was by starlight. The park is sufficiently remote to escape the light pollution from large cities, but not enough to avoid airplane traffic. To minimize them crossing the view, this exposure was done in the very early morning hours when all the airplanes have found their destinations and the only sound in the air was the distant rushing of water.
If you are interested in my occasional contributions to Thor’s Life-Notes, I invite you to follow along.
A view to the southwest includes the Milky Way, a target for one of my tests, behind incoming clouds lit by city-glow. The observatory has visitors whose cars illuminate its shell.,
A mostly clear night, and a new lens to try out! A lens I was hoping to use to capture wide-angle views of the Milky Way, and of northern lights, should I ever be in a position to do so.
I headed to Baylor Park, which is the home of Eagle Lake Observatory, operated by my astronomy club. I wasn’t there to use its facilities (though others were). I just wanted a clear view of the sky outside the city, somewhere I could practice techniques for making timelapse sequences, preferably alone, where I could make mistakes without an audience.
The internet has evolved tremendously since its early days when I first tried to use web pages to show the results of my nighttime photography. Back then, our (dial-up) Internet Service Provider (ATT) offered a home page and a URL subspace to their customers. I took advantage of it and crafted some pages to hold my pictures and stories. Later, I acquired my own domain, nightscapes.net, found a host, loaded my stuff onto it and even got some professional help to re-organize when it became unwieldy.
I learned that maintaining a website can be a lot of work; the technology evolves, links and scripts break, web page conventions, html standards and visitor expectations change. I’m not a programmer (despite a lifetime of doing it), and my interests are in the art and science of images, not the latest network and browser technologies for supporting the latest desktop/laptop/tablet/phone displays.
So I was excited to discover a website service oriented toward photographers, a platform with a small army of support people who maintain it, with features that display photographs at their best, regardless of display or browser, keeping up with the latest updates to internet programming standards. They offer additional services for professional photographers (“buy print”, etc), and at an earlier time I might have subscribed to them.
But I am happy now to keep the shopping cart icons suppressed and not distract from the images themselves.
I have transferred my collection of nightscapes accumulated over the last two decades, over to smugmug, where you can find it at thorolson.smugmug.com. I know people don’t power-browse through large collections of pictures, so I consider this to be really more of an archive, to continue my project of making a digital coffee table book of my favorites.
But I will also use the site to display my more recent work, as I complete it. It will be a relief to have a way to do so without the overhead of manually creating and integrating new web pages for them.
I intend to make posts to this, my personal website, when I add new photographs. I invite you to subscribe or “follow” me, which will send you an email when new posts are made. If you are intrigued by the types of pictures I like to take, well, I take enjoyment in sharing them and would love to have you as a follower.
By the miracles of modern technology (a technology I contributed to!), it is possible to self-publish a book without a minimum printing run of thousands or more. I recently took advantage of one of these services to make a limited edition of my collection of stories and essays, Nightscape Odyssey, posted previously on this site.
It was tricky to get the layout just right; it took two proofs, but I’m happy with the result and the experience was satisfying, especially taking delivery of the final copies. Even more satisfying was giving them away as gifts.
If you didn’t get one, it was because you probably aren’t one of my nephews or nieces, whom I felt should have some artifact of their odd uncle’s interests, and stories about what road trips were like way back when. Don’t worry though, if you really want a copy of this book, the same company that published them for me can make one for you! You’ll have to pay the going rate however, and you may find it more than you want to shell out for just another coffee table book. (https://www.blurb.com/b/10435240-nightscape-odyssey)
But if you don’t insist on an actual physical hard-cover book, Nightscape Odyssey can be had for free! A pdf version is available for download (20MB). I hope you enjoy it!
I have long been fascinated by sunflowers. On my travels across the prairies of the Dakotas I loved to encounter sunflower fields with their collective bright yellow heads all aimed in the same direction.
It is generally known that sunflowers track the sun across the sky, from east to west. I wondered what happens after sunset, when the flowers would all be facing west. With no phototropism to guide it, how would they get ready for the eastern sunrise? Would they be caught off-guard in the morning and suddenly swing their heads back at the risk of floral whiplash? Or is there a gradual re-setting of the neck-stalk fibers back to an easterly gaze?
Extracted from a frame in the timelapse series showing a Perseid meteor streaking along the path of the Milky Way toward the current position of Jupiter.
Every year in August the Earth passes through a comet debris field, and when a grain of comet dust falls through the atmosphere it heats up and vaporizes, showing as a streak of light and sometimes leaving a glowing trail. We enjoy seeing them as “falling stars”.
This year, as part of our Covid-coping strategy, we were on a two-day camping trip to a state park during the meteor shower. It was a fortuitous coincidence, unexpectedly accompanied by clear weather. I set up some cameras hoping to capture the meteors, but they were elusive. As a consolation, I assembled the frames into a timelapse and although only a few frames caught meteors, they did capture some of the other beautiful elements of the night sky.
The brightest star is actually planet Jupiter, and it has a bright companion to the left, Saturn. The Milky Way is visible as it moves slowly across the sky with them. Some of the bright spots move more rapidly. The steady ones are satellites, the others are airplanes. Mid- and high level clouds form, move, and evaporate over the duration of the timelapse (3-1/2 hours).
A meteor itself is a momentary flash, leaving a faint streak on the image frame. A sharp-eyed observer may find some in the video, but it only shows as one frame among the 30 per second. One such frame has been extracted, showing a meteor strike seemingly aimed at Jupiter.
I have accidentally enjoyed the Perseids throughout my life, as I have often been on camping and backpacking trips in August. The night sky is awe-inspiring in any dark sky site and it is all the more so when accented by the long bright streamers created as we travel through comet dust.
