Opposing Trails

A 157 minute exposure looking southeast from Rocky Mountain National Park, over the beautiful town of Grand Lake, CO. Notice the opposing curves in the star tra...
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A 157 minute exposure looking southeast from Rocky Mountain National Park, over the beautiful town of Grand Lake, CO. Notice the opposing curves in the star trails. The curvature of the star trails tighten as we look toward the celestial polar north or south, which are in line with the earth's axis. If we stood at the equator and took this same type of photo looking straight east or west, stars would appear as a vertical line at the center and fan out at the top toward their celestial poles. The same is happening here, except this shot is taken at about 40 degrees north latitude. Without a photo, it's a little hard to imaging the earth's equator extending into space to infinity.

Because the moon was in a little brighter stage than I like for night shots, I waited until it was nearly set to start this photo. The foreground is lit by it, shown here by shadows of the trees behind me. The Milky Way is rising throughout this shot illuminating the sky more than normal. With an exposure of over two hours, it's uncommon to not have much movement in the trees from wind. Overall the night was fairly calm. There is a bit of blur in the tree on the right from wind movement. Light pollution in the background is from the city of Denver, about 80 miles distant.
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