It seems to take several comments from friends about how I have’t posted on my blog for a while to move me to do so. Got another last night via Facebook, so here’s what happened when I ventured into the frigid wilderness. North Lake Tahoe is in that “shoulder” season between the warmer weather and the colder, with small patches of Thursday’s snow still surviving in the shady areas. The weather is turning very cold at night and the ski resorts are making snow like crazy to prepare for a late November opening. On clear nights, the stars are as amazing as ever, the Milky Way’s gasses visible to the naked eye as a faint band of haze running across the sky.
I went to Hidden Beach around an hour before the moon set to see what things looked like on the water. But the wind was frigid and biting as it hit me from the lake’s direction, and though I was bundled up, my face was exposed and very uncomfortable any time I stepped into the wind. So I turned away from the water to see what I could find and discovered this great old pine tree about halfway up the hill. It was interesting from several perspectives so I just photographed it for a couple of hours.
This image is a 10-minute exposure to show the star trails as the earth rotates around the North Star. I thought I had Polaris lined up in a very clever spot, just above the tree’s branches, but as you can see, I was off by a mile. Polaris is out of frame completely. I was fooled by a faux Little Dipper. It turns out that with so many stars visible and bright in the sky, it can be very challenging to find the familiar constellations. They are lost among all the lights up there with no pollution to black out the smaller stars. Even when I’d seen this image on my camera and knew about where Polaris was hiding, I still couldn’t find it! I guess I should lug yet another piece of equipment, the iPad, and use its star finder app to figure out where the north star is. Pretty soon I’m going to need a sherpa!
