The summer thunderstorm season got off to a slightly early start this year with moisture flowing northward into northern Arizona in late June. A more typical start would be the first or second week of July. However, you won’t get complaints from most folks about the early start as it signals the end of wildfire season.
Rainbow over Grand Canyon.
The highlight this early in the season is this rainbow seen from Yavapai Point on the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park. The rainbow spans nearly 3/4 of a full circle and contains both primary and secondary bows. Rainbows typically are at least 50% hidden owing to the horizon. Only when the horizon is lower than the observer—e.g., from a mountaintop or over a canyon—will more than 50% be visible.
Winter is fading away in the higher elevations of northern Arizona. Snow has melted across much of the area allowing the trails to be used again for walking, running, and, especially, mountain biking. While the trails were covered in snow this winter we did most of our mountain biking in Sedona. Although snow does fall there, it rarely lasts long. Here are a few photographs from Sedona mountain biking this winter.
Chuckwagon Trail in the Dry Creek area. Snow lingered in the shadows making for interesting travel.Occasionally we had to walk around the ice. This is in a mostly dry wash near the Rabbit Ears.
Winter is slowly coming to an end and we are about to transition into the warmer months of spring and summer. During these upcoming months, the center of our galaxy—The Milky Way—will be rising earlier each evening.
Milky Way rises above Cathedral Rock in Sedona, Arizona.
For photographers—and just about everyone else, too—staring up on a clear, moonless night with the Milky Way glowing above can be a magical experience. For those who live in brightly-lit cities, however, the Milky Way can be difficult or even impossible to see. From an article at PBS:
Light pollution — the needless shining of bright lights into the night sky — has robbed whole generations of the chance to see nature on its largest scale. It is estimated that as many as eighty percent of all the people alive today have never even glimpsed the Milky Way. (When a massive power outage struck southern California in the 1990s, Los Angeles residents reportedly called 911 to express alarm about strange clouds hovering overhead; they were seeing the Milky Way for the first time.)
With the rapid advancement of digital cameras in the past decade the ability to take images of the night sky has become remarkably easier. Not easy—just easier. Cameras can now take long exposures at high ISO settings to reveal details of the night sky not easily visible to the unaided eye. This has resulted in magnificent photographs of the Milky Way but also other objects such as comets and Deep Sky Objects (DSO).
Still, long exposures of the night sky can result in the stars leaving streaks (i.e., “star trails”) across the image. This is the result not of the stars moving, of course, but the earth’s rotation. Typical wide-angle lenses used for photographing the Milky Way are limited to about 15 to 30 seconds before trails become obvious. In order to capture enough night-sky light at these exposures requires high ISO settings which can add considerable noise to the image. Of course, sometimes star trails are desired as seen in the image below:
Star trails above Cathedral Rock in Sedona, Arizona.
Another option is to use a tracking device that follows the motion of the stars (or, more correctly, counteracts the rotational motion of the earth) allowing the camera to take very long exposures without star trails. The downside of this technique is while the stars remain pin points of light, the ground is blurred as the camera slowly moves during the exposure.
Long exposure without tracking (left) and with tracking (right).
The solution requires taking multiple images: one of the stars with the star tracker on and a second image of the ground with the tracker turned off.
The image shown at the top of this post is a composite to two images: one of the stars and one of the ground.
The star image was taken using the iOptron Skytracker, a relatively inexpensive tracker. The image was shot using a low sensitivity (ISO 400) to minimize sensor noise. The lens was an ultra-wide 16mm shot at f/4 and the duration of the exposure was 534 seconds (~9 minutes). The exposure for the foreground was shorter in duration (4 minutes) and at a higher sensitivity (ISO 1600).
The two images were combined as layers in Photoshop. Masks were applied to each of the images and then blended so that the pin-point stars on one image and the sharp foreground of the other image remained.
It turns out that taking the images was the easy and fun part. Standing around in the middle of the night watching stars, meteors, and satellites cross the sky can be very enjoyable. Not surprisingly, the blending of the images took many attempts and much time.
The canyons that surround Sedona are known to contain many Native American dwellings and other artifacts. Visiting these sites can be an exciting adventure—especially if you don’t actually know where they are.
I suppose there are web sites and other sources of information that might show where these are and even include photographs and GPS coordinates. I’m less interested in visiting these web sites to get precise information than I am in exploring and finding them on my own. I certainly won’t find many this way—but that’s okay. It’s the adventure that provides the interest.
So we have been visiting and re-visiting some canyons in the area and trying to determine where dwellings might exist. There are several ways to do this. One is to look carefully at the cliff walls and decide if these might support a dwelling. The next is to look for faint paths created by others that lead to the hidden sites within the canyon. And the third is to listen for loud folks who’ve found something and follow them ;-)
Cliff dwelling in a canyon near Sedona.
Methods two and three above worked in our favor recently and we visited this dwelling. It was well preserved and there were some pottery sherds (also sometimes called “shards”) as well as corn cobs. As is often the case, visitors had picked up these artifacts and placed them on rocks or walls for easy viewing—although most archeologists suggest they be left where they were found.
Ancient rock art on canyon walls.Pottery sherds laid out on nearby rocks.
Our appetites whetted, we plan to visit these canyons again and try to find more
sites.
The last two days have presented some interesting opportunities to photograph the moon under vastly different lighting.
The day before the full moon (27 September 2015) was a chance to shoot the moon as it rose between the pillars of Cathedral Rock in Sedona, Arizona. Timing and location was determined using The Photographers Ephemeris. Shooting the moon the day before the full moon ensures that the moon has risen high enough to clear the rocks and that there is still good lighting on the rocks.
As always, I get a little nervous as I wait for the moon to rise from behind the rocks. Did I get the location right? Usually I’m pretty close and only have to move a short distance in one direction or the other; this time I didn’t have to move at all. Whew! A couple of photographers from Flagstaff joined me for this event. It was their first time “Shooting the Moon” at Cathedral Rock and they had a great time.
A nearly full moon rising behind Cathedral Rock, Sedona, Arizona.Just a few minutes later, the moon is about to rise above the central spires Cathedral Rock.
The main event came a day later with the lunar eclipse. This month’s full moon was also a so-called “Supermoon” which means that the moon was at perigee (closest approach). A full moon at perigee is visually larger up to 14% in diameter and shines 30% brighter than one at its farthest point (apogee). But since the moon was moving through the Earth’s shadow during the eclipse, brightness wasn’t really all that important.
Total lunar eclipse.
The shadowed moon was dark enough that I was able to capture several stellar occultations during totality. This image was taken just a few seconds before the star HIP 1601 at the upper left limb of the moon was eclipsed. For this image, I used the iOptron Skytracker so that I could take longer images without streaking the stars or moon.
Just moments later, bands of thin cirrus clouds invaded the sky.
