On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether youâre traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
I suppose it’s wrong of me to wish that we could have NEOWISE every week? Â Though these are lovely, too! Â ~WaterGirl
?BillinGlendaleCA
I’ve long said star trails are easy to shoot, and they are since you are freed from many of the constraints that you normally face in landscape astrophotography. You don’t have to worry about limiting exposure time to get pin point stars, you don’t have to have the lens wide open to let in the most light possible and you don’t need to bump up your ISO (light sensitivity).
They do take a lot of time to shoot. Two of the shots you see here were 90 minute shots and one was 81 minutes. I generally shoot these in 30 second or 1 minute intervals and then put them together in post as well as the foreground. Since these are composed of multiple long exposures, having sufficient battery power, composition and proper focus on the stars is important. All of these shots are shots that needed to be retaken since one or several of these conditions were not met.
When you drive up US-395 to the Owens Valley you will see a Red Hill just after you pass Little Lake, they highway curves to the west of the hill. When I went up to Mt. Whitney in February I stopped here to take pictures and determined that this would be the perfect shot for star trails. I originally shot this with my NX1 and my 16-50mm zoom lens with the stars focused at 16mm, when I set it on the tripod the weight of the front of the lens moved it out to 18mm and so 90 minutes of shots were slightly out of focus. When I re-shot this, I used my 12mm prime lens.
The stars circle around Polaris over Mt. Pinos at the northern end of the Lockwood Valley. At the lower left is comet NEOWISE. I originally shot this several years ago. The place where I normally shoot was blocked off so I shot by the side of the road and so the composition was poor and my battery wasn’t fully charged leading to only a 45 minute star trail.
Star trail over the rocks north of the the Ryan Mountain trailhead. One star trail below and slightly to the right of Polaris goes a bit off. This is because a flare from the ISS showed up in one of the shots. Again this was a re-shot due to the lens zoom moving. I shot the multi-row panorama so my lens was focused on the stars, I moved the tripod to get a more favorable position for Polaris over the rocks and the lens moved from 16mm to 20mm. I re-shot this with the same lens on my last trip to Joshua Tree taking great care to look at a one-to-one preview of the shot before I started taking the series of photos for the star trails.
?BillinGlendaleCA
What’d ya mean? NEOWISE is in two of those shots. It’s hard to see in the first one, but the tail is just left of the Red Hill. In the second one, it’s pretty easy to see the bright nucleus and the tail. Anyways, NEOWISE has retreated back into the solar system’s deep freeze not to return for another 6700 years.
Each month I put together a sampler of some of what my patrons saw during the previous month. I didn’t do one for June, so here’s the link to both June and July.
June Sampler
July Sampler
HinTN
I find great beauty in these star trails. They tell a dynamic story with a static medium, which is deeply relaxing.
Thank you, as always, for this work.
As an aside, I used your shot of NEOWISE, with your mark of course, as my FB cover photo. I should have asked your permission in advance and apologize if this does not meet your approval.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@HinTN: Glad you like the star trails, the key is to find a compelling foreground. They’re one thing you can pretty much shoot all year.
As long as my images are credited, I’m not too concerned with their use since they’re pretty low resolution.
JPL
I’m in awe of your talent.  Thanks Bill for the pics.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@JPL: Thanks.
shecky
A Red Hill? You mean the cinder cone? Been a while, but my recollection is there’s a primitive camp site called Fossil Falls, and a prominent cinder cone right off the 395. I never knew it had a name, it just sticks out pretty clearly. I think it’s mined for road gravel. The lake itself always seemed so creepy and put of place. I think it has something to do with the L.A. Aqueduct, which runs mostly enclosed on the western side of the 395. I’d been told there were petroglyphs nearby and easily accessible, unlike the ones on the base, But my directions were not very specific, and I couldn’t find any.
arrieve
Gorgeous as always Bill. Van Gogh would have loved them too.
HinTN
@arrieve:
Completely agree!
laura
Beautiful as always BillinGlendale, Thank you.
https://youtu.be/dipFMJckZOM
WaterGirl
@?BillinGlendaleCA: You have a better eye than I do, but then we all knew that already!
J R in WV
I love the great photo(s) of Neowise and its double trail, one straight as an exhaust plume of blue ions, the other an expanding shower of bits of cosmic dust and water drops.
Thanks for sharing the June and July posts, nice to see what you’re up to out there on the left coast. We always wanted to do a slow driving tour of California, so far we’ve spent a long weekend in San Francisco (back in the late 1980s) and a week in LA after our whale watching trip to Baja Californiy Sud, so a long way to go and a short time to get there. And of course seeing all the things we would like to see in a week or even two would be impossible.
Origuy
Have you ever shot in the Alabama Hills, near Lone Pine? I came across some pictures of the place in Atlas Obscura the other day. Now I want to go, but it’s a long way from anywhere.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@shecky: Yup, the cinder cone. I know about Fossil Falls, the campgrounds and picnic area are just down the road(Cinder Road) from where I shot the star tail. I’m pretty sure that Little Lake is a natural lake and not a creation of LADWP.
@HinTN:
@arrieve:Â Thanks.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@laura: Thanks.
@WaterGirl: I also see the subs, so these things a a bit clearer than when they’re combined.
@J R in WV: It’s a big state, there’s lots to see here. I do try for some of the unexpected kinds of stuff.
@Origuy: I’ve shot in the Alabama Hills*, but not at night because everybody shoots night stuff up there.
*My next OTR submission will prove that.
Jinchi
Interesting. Since you’re stacking them in post, do you ever rotate the images, aligning the stars before stacking, to bring out the deep sky objects?
BigJimSlade
Great job! I don’t have the patience for taking so many shots over so long and then stacking them, etc in Photoshop… We did go up to the Mt. Pinos parking lot at night a few years ago – some guys had some serious astronomy gear! There was some snow on the ground, so a couple cars had their headlights on, pointing at the hillside they were playing on. That wasn’t too appreciated by me, as I wanted darkness to see the enjoy the stars :-/
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Jinchi: For star trails, no. The idea for star trails is to get the movement of the stars. If I’m doing images other than star trails, I use Sequator to align and stack multiple images.
@BigJimSlade: Thanks, as I mentioned in my reply to Jinchi, I don’t stack the sky in Photoshop, I use Sequator or for star trails I’ll sometimes use StarStax if I don’t like the results in Sequator. I’ve been up to the parking lot near the summit of Mt. Pinos at night and it’s really dark up there. The last time I went up there, there were a bunch of folk with telescopes and it wasn’t so dark, so I headed back down into Lockwood Valley to the place I shot this star trail(it was the first time I shot in that location in the valley).
On of the reasons I like Sequator is it’s fast(and free) and has a light pollution reduction function that is quite good(the guy who wrote it is from urban Taiwan so he has to deal with light pollution).
?BillinGlendaleCA
@?BillinGlendaleCA: ETA: I noted that I don’t stack the sky portion of the image in Photoshop(using Sequator mostly), I DO stack the foreground in Photoshop since I have more control over the image and I often will exclude layers where I don’t like something about the individual sub(usually car lights or headlamps).
BigJimSlade
@?BillinGlendaleCA: A-ha – specialty software – very nice results!