Desert Wildflowers & Star Trails

From the photographer “March 2008 was a spectacular time for wildflowers in Southern California’s Anza-Borrego Desert, and the air throughout the Borrego Valley was filled with a floral perfume. On the evening of March 18, the nearly full moon illuminated a broad area of beautiful flowers near the foothills of the Santa Rosa Mountains. Polaris, the North Star, appears relatively stationary near the center of the concentric star trails. To photograph star trails as the Earth rotates, one must leave a camera shutter open for many minutes or hours―in this case, 70 minutes―and wait for the light of the moving stars to register as trails. Many current digital cameras, however, are unable to do this well and produce highly-objectionable digital noise in long exposure images. This was avoided here by taking 127 separate relatively short exposures from 9:19 to 10:29 p.m., and blending them into one image.”