Very early season Milky Way rises over the Salton Sea at Desert Beach along the North Shore. A nice warm campfire and a visit from another photographer from Instagram. Tonight (technically early Wednesday March 1st 2017) the sky was nice and clear. The water had a bit of a wake, though, so I couldn't get any nice reflections like the previous night. This is a single frame from a time lapse I shot for about four hours. I'll be processing and posting that in the near future. I shot this at 4:47 AM PST with my Canon 6D and Sigma 15mm at 25 sec f/2.8 ISO 3200.
Very early season Milky Way rises over the Salton Sea at Desert Beach along the North Shore. I've been camping at Desert Beach since Sunday evening. After midnight on Monday morning it became far to cloudy to see much of anything in the sky - let alone the Milky Way. So, I decided to spend an extra night and hope for the best. Well, not only did it get cloudy Monday night, it even poured rain for a while. The hourly forecast called for a chance of partly cloudy skies early Tuesday morning, though. I hoped that I'd be lucky and the clouds - to the southeast, at least - would open up sometime between 4:00 AM and 5:00 AM so that I could shoot the galaxy before the light from the rising sun got in the way. Well, there were clouds everywhere and it seemed hopeless until around 4:40 AM things cleared up enough to the southeast that I could see the Milky Way with my own eyes. I did some test shots and couldn't believe how awesome things looked straight from the camera without any processing. I continued to shoot until about 5:07 AM when the light form the rising sun started to wash things out. I shot this at 4:51 AM PST with my Canon 6D and Sigma 15mm at 25 sec f/2.8 ISO 4000. The water even slowed down a bit to make for some decent reflections.
The partly-cloudy skies got in the way of doing star trails, but give the sky a nice sense of depth and will make for a fun time lapse. Shot with my Canon 6D and Sigma 15mm at 20 sec f/2.8 ISO 4000.
