Up towards the stars [Explore 2015-08-03]

We spent 3 days in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada to attend Aeronaut, a rocket launch event organized by AeroPac. We are now back from the wilderness. We were disconnected from the internet, which felt good.

 

Our friend Steve Jurvetson launched a high power rocket at night. On this long exposure you see just the trail of the fiery plume of the rocket, and a halo caused by the exhaust smoke. The fiery plume illuminated the surrounding ground. It was blue moon, so you can see the blue clouds as well.

 

Someone else launched a rocket at night with hundreds of LEDs as payload. Each LED had a tiny parachute. It was a magical scene, it looked like the Milky Way slowly descending to Earth!

 

I shot this in manual mode using a fast prime lens with f/1.8. This allowed me to use a low ISO of 200 at night on a 5 sec exposure. I used a 2 sec timer delay to avoid camera shake, and pressed the button at count-down T minus 2 - low noise is important for good HDR processing. I processed a balanced HDR photo from a RAW exposure.

 

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-- © Peter Thoeny, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, HDR, 1 RAW exposure, NEX-6, _DSC4382_hdr1bal1b

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