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Star Trails, The Manifold, Zabriskie Point

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Star Trails, The Manifold, Zabriskie Point
The Manifold, Star Trails – Zabriskie Point

Star Trails, The Manifold, Zabriskie Point. Death Valley National Park, California. March 29, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Star trails above the Manifold, Zabriskie Point, Death Valley National Park, California.

One of my goals on my late-March trip to Death Valley was to do some night photography, in particular to take advantage of the nearly full moon near the end of my visit. Some of my plans did not quite work out – for example, on the night when I intended to do night photography of the moving rocks at the Racetrack Playa it was cloudy all night! However, on the final night of my visit the weather gods cooperated and I was able to make a few exposures from Zabriskie Point as the moon rose. As if to partially make up for messing up the intended Racetrack shots, the “cloud gods” were kind enough to provide me with a few high thin clouds at Zabriskie. This was one of those wonderful occasions when things actually did go as planned!

Anticipating the full moon at Zabriskie, I made a point of camping in the vicinity of Furnace Creek at the Texas Springs campground. (I expect that my habits mystified a few nearby campers. I drove in at about 2:00 p.m., grabbed a site and “marked” it by leaving a chair and a tarp, and almost immediately left – not returning until nearly 10:00 p.m. Then I was up and gone well before sunrise.) In any case, I headed down to the Badwater area in the late afternoon to photograph sunset light on the salt flats and evening clouds – following an impromptu “dinner” at the back of my car at the Badwater parking lot. It was getting fairly dark by the time I finished up at Badwater, so I headed straight up to Zabriskie. By the time I arrived the moon was just coming up over the mountain range to the east, with its light at times filtering through high clouds. During the hour I was there I made three exposures. With exposure times in the 8 to 12 minute range and followed by “dark frame exposures” of equal length, this was a slow and quiet process.

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Technical Data:
Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM
ISO 200, f/8, 787 seconds (not a typo!)

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7 thoughts on “Star Trails, The Manifold, Zabriskie Point”

  4. I’m still often surprised to see how long the star trails can be even with relatively short exposures. By the way, the basic exposure info that I learned for the stars is to use f/8 for ISO 100 – this seems to give good brightness on the trails in normal situations. You can probably go about a stop either way from here.

    Dan

    Reply

  5. Great, thanks for the information, Dan. I guess that makes sense about the exposure. I’ve heard about similar tests for the initial exposure times. Maybe I was just relating back to my experience (only a couple times) of trying star trails and I recall (possibly in error) that I wanted to be down around f/4 or so to get the star trails bright enough in the frame.

    If you say the picture was overly bright at f/8, then it would probably have been blown out at f/4 if you’d used the same 12 minute shutter speed (any shorter might have sacrificed too much of the star trails). And the length of the star trails is another thing – my initial guess was that you’d done much longer shutter speed than you had, just gauging on the length of the trails. Again, with my possibly poor memory, I seem to recall needing closer to an hour (6 x 10 minute exposures) for star trails of equal length. If that’s not poor memory, then perhaps is has to do with you shooting in southern California and, at the time, I was shooting in Montana (our rotational velocity is a fair amount lower at this latitude – I assume the length of star trails is proportional).

    Reply

  6. Jeff:

    About exposure for images like this:

    • My general rule is more or less to set everything as I would for a daytime landscape exposure except that the exposure time is radically increased. I did increase the ISO to 200 (a good option on the Canon 5D2) and use f/8, but the exposure time was about 12 minutes or so.
    • Watching the histogram is critical – don’t judge by what the image looks like in the LCD, or you’ll get an underexposed shot.
    • Because my RAW looked roughly like a daytime shot, most of the work in post was to bring brightness levels back down to a point at which they would be consistent with a night shot. I did not do too much to the foreground but I used a curve layer to darken the sky appropriately.

    I have a trick for determining an exposure starting point. I set camera ISO to 6400 and open the lens up to the largest aperture and simply make an exposure in aV (aperture priority) mode. It is amazing just how dark the conditions can be and still the camera will generate a decent exposure. Of course, this image will look awful – it will have terrible noise and there will be no star trails. I check the histogram to see if any additional adjustments are needed and then calculate backwards to the right ISO and aperture to get the right shutter speed. For example, let’s say it takes a 2 second exposure with these extreme camera settings. I know that if I cycle back to ISO 100 that I’ll need compensate by extending exposure by 6 stops – or making it about two minutes. If the test was at f/4 and I plan to shoot at f/8, I’ll need to compensate an additional 2 stops, making the overall exposure about eight minutes long.

    About rock movement:

    From what I can tell, those rocks move very rarely – probably no more than often than once in a lifetime, if that. We think “moving rocks” and imagine the rocks traveling around the playa, but that travel must occur on a geological time scale. The set of conditions that seem to be required to move the rocks must be quite rare. With the exception of some of the very smallest rocks (those of an inch or two across), the thinking is that three unusual conditions need to be present simultaneously:

    • A very flooded playa that creates slippery mud and a layer of standing water. (I think this must be rare – even the recent very heavy rains didn’t create this condition.)
    • Very cold temperatures that last long enough to freeze the surface of the standing water – but which don’t freeze it all the way to the surface of the playa. The thinking is that the larger rocks only move when the wind acts on the frozen surface – and this explains some of the parallel curving tracks.
    • Extremely strong winds. The playa is a very windy place – those who have been out there a few times can usually tell stories about very, very strong winds. But it must take winds that are exceptional even by these standards to force the rocks to move.

    So, no worries about rocks moving during long exposures – even on April 1. :-)

    Dan

    Reply

  7. Dan – I’m glad the clouds worked out for you on this occasion, it really produced an interesting photograph. You seem to have nailed the exposure – which seems like a tricky task (often both your shutter speed and aperture is set to optimize the star trails, but the ground seems perfectly exposed as well). Was there some trial and error, or any exposure blending?

    Question on shooting long exposures on the racetrack – did you expect to catch any rock movement? If so, wouldn’t it just have been a blurry rock?

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