Morse Code over Kauai

Morse Code over Kauai

This star trail image was taken from the southern point of Poipu, Hawaii. We are facing south over the ocean. My goal was to have long and striking trails crashing into the ocean (as I was not pointing at the north star). The sky was amazingly bright and clear - in short burst! Only for about 10 minutes at a time. Instead of long sweeping star trails, the universe decided to send me Morse code. I wonder what the message means?

Actually, this is the story.... as usual, the skies were mostly clear all day but there was spotty rain. I hiked up to this point around dusk and set up my kit hoping that the clouds would break to reveal the Milky Way rising. Behind me to the north (the direction I originally scouted) was COMPLETELY obscured with clouds. I had originally wanted to point in that direction (directly at the north star) and get the shoreline and mountains in the shot with complete star circles. Sometimes you have to adapt. So, due to cloud cover, I decided to turn around and point in the other direction where the sky looks mostly clear. The weather sort of cooperated. It didn't rain until later, but the wind continued to blow at a brisk 20 knots. This made for very fast moving clouds.

I set up my kit and intervalometer with the goal of getting a set of 70 shots, each taken at 30 seconds. With 30 seconds between each, that is just over an hour of elapsed time. I waited a couple of hours after sunset for a black sky and started the shoot.

Well, as you guessed, the shoot only lasted 40 minutes before I had to stop and pack up because the cloud cover was almost 100% and rain was imminent. The result? Well, a sequence of 30 good shots which were usable.

The dots and dashes are a combination of two things. A) too small of a sample of images. I really need around 70 or so with less time between each. and B) completely covered stars when the clouds were covering them. giving "holes" in the sample images.

The end result? I really like it.

Technical details. For the trails, The setup was my new Nikon D500 set on my travel tripod. Since the wind was blowing, I strapped my heavy camera bag to the bottom of the tripod and let it hang down to stabilize the whole kit. This gave me the rigidity and kept motion to a minimum. The intervalometer was set to 70 shots x 30 second interval. I only captured 32 of the 30 second exposures before aborting the shoot due to weather. The lens was a Tokina 10-17 opened to 10mm. ISO 2000, F3.5. The foreground image was shot from the same location when setting up - ISO1000 at 10mm, 1-50th at F-20. All images were cleaned up in Lightroom CC. The star trails were brought together in StarTrax software.

As far as the image goes, at 10mm, out of the camera, the whole image looked very fish-eye like. As the horizon was low in the image, the ground looked like a horse-shoe. So, in Lightroom, for all the images, I selected "Enable Profile Correction” for this lens to flatten the horizon. This worked, but the side effect was stretching at all 4 corners of the image - and the star trails look like a vortex on the top left hand side. I actually think this is pretty cool and adds to this image.

The glow on the top right side were the thicker clouds being illuminated from the lights of the town of Lahui which was 15 miles away. Light pollution and clouds? Well, I also think this adds to the effect of this image.
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