On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
?BillinGlendaleCA
I’ve shared with you photos from Fossil Falls in these pages before, startrails with the Red Hill as a foreground and a meteor shower. But in all my trips to Fossil Falls I’d never taken the trail all the way to the “falls”. The “falls” were created by the Owens river eroding a layer of lava during the end of the last Ice Age as the glaciers receded from the Sierras. Now days they are pretty much dry, hence the name Fossil Falls.
These photos are actually from two trips to Fossil Falls, the first was a stop on the way to the Cottonwood Kilns and the next was a group Milky Way shoot the following weekend. The day shots from the first visit were taken with my Galaxy Camera 2 and were converted to RAW format to aid in processing the shots. The night shots from the group shoot the next Saturday were taken with my NX1.
It’s a pretty short hike from the parking lot to the “falls”, which cut a deep and narrow valley in the lava field. The mountains of the Coso volcanic field can be seen in the background.
The valley widens out as it leads to Little Lake, a small lake along side US-395. The southern Sierra Nevada’s lie in the distance.
One of the reasons I wanted to stop at Fossil Falls on our first trip up was to scout out locations with interesting lava formations for the next week’s shoot. I actually ended up shooting at a location I scouted out that evening.
I’d seen photos of this little arch and wanted to find it to see if it’d be a good foreground for a Milky Way shot, unfortunately it’s more to the northeast (the Milky Way core is to the southeast).
In May I shot a Milky Way arch at Fossil Falls and really wanted to get a 306° view. The foreground was shot just after sunset and the Moon, while present in the sky was shot the next day here in Glendale and added in.
One of the reasons I shoot a 360° shot is to produce a Tiny Planet projection. You can see the Red Hill at the top, with the Sierras at the left and the volcanic Coso range at the right. The light dome at the right is from Las Vegas (about 140 miles away) and the one at the bottom is from Ridgecrest and Los Angeles.
The Milky Way arch, you can see Saturn just rising over the hills to the left of the core.
With this shot of the Milky Way core, I’ve brightened the area above the core to bring out some of the nebulosity above it. This is pretty easy to capture with an astro modified camera, but I was surprised to see some of it recorded on my unmodified NX1. You can see both the nebula around Antares at the center right as well as a nebula above it.
sab
Those are amazing photos. The first us in my category of gorgeous, glad the photographer went there so I didn’t have to, because I bet that was an uncomfortable hike.
JPL
The pictures are stunning, and thank you for sharing them with us.
MomSense
Awesome!
Wag
The last photo is really amazing.
HinTN
Welp, I struggled to pick out Saturn but that failure notwithstanding these are magnificent and thank you for this start to my day.
arrieve
That last photo is just stunning. That made my day and it’s not even 10 am!
SkyBluePink
The landscape ones are beautiful and interesting but the Milky Way ones are spectacular!
J R in WV
The usual standard issue BillinGlendale product — great photos of interesting places.
Thanks again Bill, great work.
Questions, tho: How wide and deep is the gorge at Fossil Falls? Eyewitness WAG is all we’re looking for. With no people or dogs impossible to make even a WAG from just the photo….
?BillinGlendaleCA
@sab: The hike is not bad, very short; however it was hot.
@JPL: Glad you like them.
@MomSense: Thanks.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Wag: Thanks, I was a bit surprised to see some of the color when I increased the brightness in that portion of the photo.
@HinTN: It’s about a 1/3 over from the right. Glad our night skies could brighten your day.
@arrieve: Thanks much.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@SkyBluePink: There’s more! I took more Milky Way photos the past 2 weekends.
@J R in WV: Thanks and you’re welcome. They’re probably 50 foot deep at the head of the falls. One of my fellow photographers did some modeling by the falls, I thought of including it, but didn’t.
laura
Nebulosity! The vernacular of BillinGlendale.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@laura: Heh! Sounds better than a gas cloud.
Reboot
The tiny planet is like a photographic version of the planet illustrations in St-Exupery’s Little Prince. Very cool!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Reboot: I love to do the tiny planet projections, glad you like them.
JustRuss
I like the arch with the moon, great shot…even if it’s enhanced!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@JustRuss: Thanks, it’s just the Moon that was added.
Richard
That is a cool place. I have been there twice. It is near Olancha and little lake. Words can’t describe it. It is amazing to see.
I don’t believe in portals and nonsense like that. But that place is special.