On Wednesday, I spent half the night out at Pedernales Falls State Park playing at astrophotography with Jason Flenniken. We set up a couple of cameras each, one pointing south for the Milky Way and another pointed towards the north to capture star trails around Polaris. All was set until clouds rolled in just as the sun set.
After a couple of hours, I convinced myself that the evening was a dud and moved my carefully-positioned cameras just in time for the sky to clear leaving me scrambling to get everything set up again, this time in the dark and without the nice compositions I had previously set up. Regardless, I left the north-pointing camera shooting continuous 1 minute exposures for the next couple of hours to see what I could get.
This image was generated from 110 or so frames stacked in StarStax then mixed in Photoshop with a couple of other frames which, fortuitously, had visible foreground thanks to our headlamps playing over the rocks as we wandered around. The foreground is horribly noisy as a result but the overall effect is fine. The main lesson learned here was patience – next time, I won’t move the cameras, regardless of cloud conditions, until we’re getting ready to leave!