Kansas Star Trails

Abby and I went up to Kansas to my parents’ place over the weekend for my Grandma’s 95th birthday party. I wanted to take advantage of the clear skies away from the big-city lights to try some astrophotography. I needed to find something interesting for the foreground of a star trails photo and the gas well on their back 40 seemed as good as anything. I’d already done a few similar shots in the past using hay bales, a nearby church and an old grain silo. I made this photo by combining 19 photos each with a four-minute exposure using a cheap intervalometer I got off eBay. I lit the pump with a blast from an external flash during one of the exposures.

I messed up, though, by starting the sequence too early, before it got slap dark. I further messed up by using the flash during the first exposure. I tossed out the first four exposures because the sky was still pretty light. The problem was that the pump was a silhouette in those later exposures. So I spent a couple hours in Photoshop cutting out the flash-exposed pump from that first exposure with the too-light sky. Then I layered that cut-out over the combined shots with the good star trails. Don’t look too close or you’ll see my ham-handed Photoshop skills on display.

When Photoshop stopped grinding away and displayed the combined photos, I was flummoxed because some of the trails passed in front of the pump. However, the trails behind the trees and other stationary objects stayed in the background, as you would expect. I’m not too smart, so it took me awhile to figure out that the pump must have moved. Now, according to my Dad, that well had been idle for some time. I walked down to it the day before and it was in the position you see in the photo. It was absolutely not moving. When I returned to take the picture, I spent about 45 minutes jacking with my camera waiting for dark to fall and the thing didn’t move an inch. But I went back through every exposure blown up big on my computer screen. The pump area was so dark in each one that I could barely make out that the pump had indeed moved up and down at least once and returned exactly to its original position. So some of the trails in the final product have a big gap.

The sky was as clear as I think I’ve ever seen. I wanted to take a straight shot of a star field to see if I could get the Milky Way to show up in a photo. This is the front of the house. The trees are lit by a florescent street light in the back yard.

A bunch of family came in for the party. We had to go for the big number candles for obvious reasons.