Star Trails

I actually turned out better with only 125 30-sec exposures than the 200 I wanted to get!

Thats pretty cool Scott

Very good picture,

It is really cool how everything revolves around the North Star. That is the hardest part of doing an image like this; finding the North Start and finding a landscape that is interesting and has the North Star somewhere in it.

Where were you able to find dark sky? there is no place near me that does not have tons of light polution

Don Kuykendall said:

Where were you able to find dark sky? there is no place near me that does not have tons of light polution

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25 miles out of Springerville in the AZ desert. The sun sets around 5:45 and by 6:30 it was nearly black. I started shooting around 7pm.

STM said:

25 miles out of Springerville in the AZ desert. The sun sets around 5:45 and by 6:30 it was nearly black. I started shooting around 7pm.

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Just looked at the dark sky map Dark Sky Finder Looks like between where you live and where I live there is dark sky. Somewhere between Evergreen and Georginia, AL. Just ckecked, it is at about the halfway point between us.

Check out this one too, it is what I use:

The Photographer's Ephemeris - Web App

I use that too but I didn't think it would give dark sky showing light pollution.

Also important is a night with less haze/particulates in the air. Typically, the best conditions are right after a cold front has cleared an area. This often leaves clear, clean skies which allow more of the light through. (Every now and then, we see a night like this, when a laser pointer is nearly useless because there's just nothing in the sky for it to illuminate when using to point out celestial points of interest.)

Another way to improve is to go to higher elevations.

Nice photo

Whiskeyman said:

Also important is a night with less haze/particulates in the air. Typically, the best conditions are right after a cold front has cleared an area. This often leaves clear, clean skies which allow more of the light through. (Every now and then, we see a night like this, when a laser pointer is nearly useless because there's just nothing in the sky for it to illuminate when using to point out celestial points of interest.)

Another way to improve is to go to higher elevations.

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Absolutely, I was at 7500 feet MSL and it was in the 40's when I first started shooting. Don't make the same mistake I did, have SPARE WARM (!!) BATTERIES! on hand. I was only able to get 125 shots out of freshly charged batteries at the temperature before they gave up the ghost. It was somewhat difficult to find the North Star at first because the sky was absolutely clobbered with stars. No light pollution is amazing, we have no idea just how many stars there are in the sky! The Milky Way was extremely bright as well.