Wildhorse Cave Milky Way - a photo on Flickriver

            This cave (called Wildhorse) is HUGE, for scale I'm sitting on the log, it's kind of a mind-bender to look at, but the hole at the top is actually in the roof of the cave (so straight above the camera). Before I took these shots I took some others about a quarter mile down from the cave, as I was taking them it got cloudy and I wasn't sure I wanted to hike up to it because it's quite a strenuous hike to get up to with all my camera gear. But I said screw it, took the risk, and packed all my equipment up there; as I was setting up, probably 30-45 minutes later, the clouds started to clear and everything turned out fantastic by the time I was ready to take my shots. Luckily the cave faces Southeast so you can see the Milky Way perfectly as it rises above the horizon. Behind me on the wall are petroglyphs and in the top right of the picture is another hole that's slowly forming in the roof. 

Unfortunately the cave blocks the northern star so I had to wing the polar alignment for my iOptron Skytracker, I used just a compass to align to north after having practiced blind alignment earlier in the night while it was cloudy. All shots were taken with my Nikon D600 and Rokinon 24mm f1.4 lens on the iOptron Skytracker mount, the mount was left off for the foreground shots and turned on for the sky shots. The foreground shots are 1 minute exposures, f4, ISO 400 and the sky shots are 1 minute exposures, f3.2, ISO 1600. Altogether it took about an hour to collect all the exposures which meant the stars in the top hole had moved and the alignment with the front of the cave was off unfortunately.

Overall it was a really really cool experience hiking up there at night and putting all this together, a great learning experience and photography memory.

Taken on: April 5, 2016

Tags:

Milky Way

Nikon

Rokinon

24mm

f1.4

Galaxy

Utah

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Long Exposure

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