Star Trails in South Texas

I guess it's due to the rotation of the earth, but if you can program your camera to take a long exposure, you can get a "star trail" photo showing a circular pattern.

We were all out hunting in South Texas, and the stars in the sky were fantastic! No big city lights for miles, and we were staying in a shack in the middle of nowhere. When the lights went out it was freaky (2 mountain lions, very rare for this part of the country, were spotted less than half a mile away). The darkness felt like a cloak being thrown over you, with the salvation of looking up and seeing the blanket of stars above.

My buddy, Mike D, is a very good photographer--I would say he's a professional-quality photographer, which to me is someone who turns the dials on their camera and actually knows what it's going to do when it stops on something (I call my blind roulette method "artistic"). So he was going through the steps on creating a star trail. I asked him if he could help me take such a picture with my camera (exactly the same as his).

I actually wanted him to teach me how to do it, but there's one thing about Mr. Mike D.--he's somewhat impatient, especially when someone like me is trying to soak in what I'm being shown about all these features on my camera-it's almost like he feels that I'm not worthy of all the technology I possess in my hands (okay, maybe I'm not)--but he ended up ripping the camera out of my hands and rapidly setting it up for the exposure.

So he programmed his remote control keypad thingie to operate mine so we could start the exposure without having to physically touch the camera--that way there won't be be any vibration.

We went outside, risking our lives against being a mountain lion hors d' ourve, in the pitch blackness, feeling our way around, so we wouldn't contaminate our photos with stray light.

We set the digital camera menu for a long exposure--manually activated and deactivated.

We set the ISO speed to a very sensitive setting so it would pick up the dim starlight.

We laid the whole apparatus gingerly on the roof of my car, taking the risk that the $1200 camera wouldn't fall.

Once we triggered the exposure to begin, we slinked off back inside to wait it out and let the exposure reveal the movement of the earth and make a beautiful swirling pattern. I felt like a gold miner setting a charge of dynamite, blowing open a rock formation, and then going back to see if there is any gold revealed.

When we went back out, Mike snatched the camera, looked at the exposure, and said, "No, this one's no good." He reset some settings on the camera and we lit the fuse and then tiptoed quietly back inside.

We waited it out another 15-20 minutes and then grabbed the camera and went back inside.

That's when I noticed that, in his hurry to get all the settings right, disgusted by my lack of know-how with my camera, Mr. World-Class African Safari Photographer had left the lens cap on my camera! Twice! I knew he would be very irritated about that--of course it was my fault, too! I hope to God he's reading this one!

Here's a real shot of a star trail below (taken by Mr. Mike D himself):