Valley of Fire turned into a Night of Stars

[JimFox]

You can only be in Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada at night if they have a special event or if you are in a campground. On this particular night, there was both a special event and I was in the campground. So after the special event at the Fire Wave closed down at 8pm (Which I still have to process that timelapse) I went back to the campground and set up close to it to do timelapse of the stars. This was with 3 cameras, the D850, D810 and Sony A6400. As mentioned in another thread, sometime during the night a huge gust of wind came by and knocked my D810 over and breaking it. This was 2 weeks ago, and I still haven't decided whether to repair it or buy a used D810 to replace it.

I set up the cameras to f2 or f2.8 and ISO 2000 and 25 secs with no intervals. They were all locked in with Remote releases to shoot continually. I combined them in Photoshop with a 0.1 sec duration and no intervals.

All comments are welcome,

Jim

PS. Please Share this Video in FaceBook if you can. My hope is that these Video's can catch on and work as a form of advertising and pulling in new members into FocalWorld who might not otherwise have heard of us.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Neat one Jim, I like how you have the stars going one direction then another as you shift viewing angles, it's like a dance. This does not appear to be facing the north star, but it works. That comet at the end is the star of the show.

 

[JimFox]

Thanks so much Ben.

When I said a few months ago about pointing north to try and capture the stars rotating around the North Star was just something I wanted to try, it wasn’t meant to mean that was the best way to do it, I had just thought it might be cool to capture that happening.

With the Core of the Milky Way showing soon South or South East to even East facing compositions will look good. Along with North facing still.

A very important thing at night is the same as during the day, finding a compelling ground layer to help guide the image. So don’t get locked into thinking you can only aim one direction at night. Another factor is the moon, is it up, where is it at. Is there big sources of light pollution?

When I shot my Trona Pinnacles star Timelapse, I had set up and shot a great sunset to night transition. But once the stars came out I saw that the lights from the town of Trona were so incredibly strong they were blowing out in my shots, so I had to totally move and reposition my main camera down to a new spot where the pinnacles blocked the actual lights for me.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Trona has Lights ?

 

[AlanLichty]

Neat star show.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

Nice and engaging time lapse.

 

[Graeme F]

That's an impressive time-lapse. Bravo

 

[JimFox]

Trona has Lights ?

Ha ha... yeah you would be surprised! Actually there are large parts of the Pinnacles where you wouldn't see it, I think I accidently set up in the maybe one worst direction for the lights from the town. But I was way back in the far end of the Pinnacles as I wanted to do the timelapses but didn't want to get headlights from cars shining on them, especially in the first couple of hours after sunset when people can be driving around to leave. I was back far enough that there was no one else but me back there, so it was worth it for that.

 

[JimFox]

Neat star show.

Thanks Alan!

 

[Brian]

That's really cool Jim.