Miner's Point Starscape

by Mike Lee

Title

Miner's Point Starscape

Artist

Mike Lee

Medium

Photograph - Digital

Description

This is a nightscape image captured Miner’s Point on Eagle Lake in Lassen County, California USA. I captured this image on a September evening as a crescent moon of approximately 25% illumination was setting in the western sky (camera right, just out of the frame). At this time of year the galactic core of our wonderful little Milky Way Galaxy rises quite early and appears much more vertical in the sky than it does earlier in the year and serves as the indicator that it is about to go in to hiding through the winter until early spring. As with most of my starry nightscape images, the sky is a blend of multiple frames stacked together, which reduces digital “noise” and results in a cleaner image than a single frame. I then blended my sky images to a single long exposure foreground frame shot without moving the camera. This shot allowed the crescent moon to light the shoreline somewhat, adding some detail. If one looks to the left side of the sky a brighter “star” is seen. This is actually the planet Saturn and if you look closely you can see this “star” is sort of “saucer” shaped due to the rings. The lights on the ground in the distance are from the Gallatin Marina which sits just a few miles closer to the camera than Saturn’s 850 million. The orange glow on the distant horizon is likely reflected light from the community of Westwood California a few miles in the distance.

Eagle Lake sits at a surface elevation of just over 5,000 feet above sea level. It is among the largest natural lakes in California with a catchment area of some 21,500 acres. It is home to a trophy strain of rainbow trout that anglers often travel great distances to catch. It also supports many species of water fowl as well as raptors including bald eagles and osprey. I consider it my “home” lake as I’ve spent a great deal of time there and made many wonderful memories from fishing with my son or friends to just getting in a few hours of solitude such as the mid-September evening when I captured this image and I spent several hours with this location all to myself.

Uploaded

September 14th, 2021

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