Star Trails at Medicine Rock Park

A photo composite of multiple exposures. From the photographer: “This image was taken at Medicine Rock State Park in Montana, USA. This is vertical panorama, made out of 2 images of the same lens to captured the foreground and I tilted the camera to get the angle towards Polaris also called Alpha Ursae Minoris, Earth’s present northern polestar, or North Star at the end of the “handle” of the so called Little Dipper in the constellation Ursa Minor. It took 232 frames for me to create this startrails. Then I stitched the foreground to the background using the photoshop. Some of the frames showed that I captured also the Perseid Meteor showers, some meteors were short but the longest one is at left top of the photo.

The telescope was used to capture nebula because Medicine State Park was just recently declared as one of the International Dark Sky by the International Dark Sky-Association. The most interesting historic feauture of this state park was this was one of  Big Medicine, where Native Americans hunting parties conjured up magical spirits that helped to increase courage, strength, and good luck. As a matter of fact, found in this place some prehistoric weapons, and of course they also collect some medecinal herbs in this place as the Local Northern Cheyenne historians shared the story. 

As an astropotographer who loves to captured the beauty of the deep dark sky, this place for me is heaven. Staying in camp 09, I observed that this place is having 360-degree unobstructed view of the night sky.“