03/20/2026
My first attempt for star trails photography. Almost didn’t happen due to weather! 😬 Been planning for long time to visit Joshua Tree, had even booked tickets for March 2020, yup, you guessed it right, just the week of Covid pandemic started and everything was shutdown! 😳 Finally after almost 6 years rebooked the trip to JTNP, only to be hit by the worst weather that Southern California has ever seen with rain lasting whole day at Joshua Tree and winds exceeding 40 mph! Even the evening I took this picture weather was really questionable. But right at sunset the clouds parted mostly in the north. We hurriedly looked for a good location, found one close to a parking lot. I set up the camera and tripod in a hurry. At this point another challenge came up, the intervalometer in Canon does not allow more than 30 sec long exposure. To get star trails even with 17 mm, ideally would have liked 45 sec exposure. But the Bulb intervalometer only takes one picture, so I’d need to constantly manually release shutter (not sure though). Finally decided to take chance with 30 sec exposure as sitting outside in 32°F was not ideal (yes it was that cold!). We waited for one hour with bated breath. In the hour at least 20 cars passed and I was worried that would ruin the particular picture. Still by my calculations I thought it wild be 80 pictures at least. In the end I got 97 and the car headlights didn’t ruin any (in fact the foreground tree light is from a picture where a car came in the parking lot!). The Southern California sky is very busy with flights, but luckily I see only two streaks (didn’t have time to delete, instead just used masking to fade them). So, overall not bad for first attempt!
