Empire of the Stars

Even though I arrived at the Shiprock formation right outside Shiprock, New Mexico early in the day, my photographic intentions were for the coming night. There at the base of this extinct volcano that the Navajos regard as an ancient spiritual monument, I scouted and planned for the Earth’s turn away from the Sun. And this area is in a good dark spot for nighttime star gazing - In fact I came here to execute a lengthy photo project starring, well... the stars. This image is formed from over 700 twenty second long exposures, five different programs (some taking hours for just one adjustment) and over a month to plan/develop. It also is the longest processing project of 2019 coming from this night partially because of the most number of captures and challenge to capture it as a panoramic photograph of which is very rare to find. In fact, it can be extremely difficult to pull off a great day-to-night photograph anyway - so adding star trails and the sun (the closest star to us) compounded the technical and processing complexity to the point that I started to doubt its outcome. The accentuated vibrant circles and arcs come from the stars subtle colors mostly (raw images captured and pre-processed with that in mind), wispy traveling clouds over the night and sky color from approaching dawn, horizon lights and air quality. Too many clouds, however, can ruin the entire night. But not tonight! After the cameras clicked away all night, I waited patiently, but apprehensively as I traveled back to the studio, hoping all the images from the sensors and cards gathered enough ancient starlight to compose epic astrophotography images. ​ This image is a still time-lapse day-to-night project that started before sunset and finally ended about 6am due to the cameras batteries being exhausted. The holy grail of still time-lapse imagery is a successful day-to-night photograph and can entail extensive spans of time, energy, preparation and sometimes luck to land.