Starry Night

In a few months I'm going to be able to visit a National Park out West that is known for having some of the darkest skies in the country, so I've been wanting to get out and do some night photography as a little practice run. I was able to get out the other day and visit an old abandoned church near Scott, and tried to get some star trails. This attempt was much better than my last try. I remembered to bring the camera, the battery, the tripod and the shutter release. And luckily, this time I managed to succeed in not having the lens fog up and ruin most of the shots!

I set up the camera, which was set to take a :30 second exposure continuously for about two hours. It was quiet out by the old church, except for a few large combines in the field nearby that were working deep into the night. The combines were kicking up a ton of dust. At one point I turned on the flashlight, and the falling dust in the beam of light was so thick it looked like falling snow. But here is the final product, which is a combination of all of those :30 second shots from that night...



Before I left, I moved the camera over to get another angle of the church and the blanket of stars shining above: