From more than one vertical mile above, a vast ephemeral mirror stretches out across the lowest land in North America. Over the course of 77 minutes the stars streak across the sky. A tiny bit of warm light from a rising moon just touches the tops of the mountains. Looking almost due west the stars streak in a nearly uniform diagonal pattern across the sky. The reflection reveals the hidden textures of tributaries and channels of water still feeding into the evaporating lake 75 days after the remnants of Hurricane Hillary dumped more than a year’s precipitation in a single day here. That measurement of precipitation came from the valley floor below. While it might have been enough to conjure the initial lake, satellite imagery shows the lake did not reach a maximum size for perhaps two more weeks with the lake on September 5th being vastly larger than the lake on August 26th, and the storm having come through on August 20th. The precipitation in the mountains was surely greater, but it took time for that water to make its way miles and miles to get to Badwater Basin, flowing down the boulders and gravels of eroded mountains to reach the vast salt flat and recreate the lake.
In an effort to capture the maximum number of reflected stars possible, I shot wide open at f/1.4 with a high ISO. Even so the loss of light from the imperfect mirror revealed only the brighter stars whose trails were interrupted by islands of reflection disrupting ripples caused by pockets of wind in an otherwise calm night. In the sky some thin clouds on the horizon just above the greater than two mile high wall of the Panamint Mountains also caused gaps in the trails. What the reflection truly did bring out was the color of the stars, as the stars are indeed a vast array of different color temperatures, from super hot blue to cool reds and oranges. I was truly shocked at the extent of the reflected stars as they revealed water all over the valley floor. The way the reflections were broken up along the shorelines and where pockets of water could be seen by the reflection of a single trail was truly a surprise.
Airplane, car, and people light trails were painstakingly removed from the image to reflect only the wilderness. One hundred fifty-five 30-second exposures stacked with StarStaX. Lots of imperfections and things I might try differently if I attempted this one again, but that’s how we learn.
You can now see the frames that make up this image in the time lapse video here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzLI5exyv-A 