Spin Cycle

This style of photography is extremely demanding on oneself and your equipment. Each exposure lasts at least 30 minutes and the night disappears into morning quickly. Little sleep as you wake up every hour and reset equipment, dew and frost loves to attack your equipment and your battery gives out quickly. Was it worth the effort? you be the judge.

When we look into space we often see a static and still world, but our earth is moving around the sun at a speed of 67,000 miles an hour. Meanwhile the earth spins on its axis at a speed of around 1000 miles per hour measured from the equator.

Shot taken along a dusty country road above Idaho Falls in an area called 'Bone' Idaho. Its a quiet area I lost count of the Jack Rabbits i saw, counted 10 owls and heard the very distant howl of a shy coyote. A great yet sleepless evening. I slept perhaps an hour and a half out in the field during exposures and pulled into the drive way home at 5:30 in the morning.

An interesting fact is if we were to properly calibrate the camera we could determine the approximate surface temperature of each point of light The blue and white streaks in the sky represent stars that have a surface temperature much hotter than the others while the redder ones followed by the yellow stars are progressively cooler. Of course someone is going to show up and point out that Stars are not perfect black bodies but we can make approximations.