Milky Way @ McWay Falls, Big Sur State Park
Location: McWay Falls, Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, Big Sur, planet Earth
Created: 08/13/15 8:37:40 pm & 9:40:35 pm
Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark iii
Lens: EF16-35mm f/4L IS USM
Aperture Sky: f/4.0; @16mm; 20 sec.; ISO 8000
Aperture Land: f/4.5; @16mm; 13 sec.; ISO 500
McWay Falls seemed like a good spot to capture the Milky Way. A friend and I planned the trip using the Photographer's Ephemeris, a map-centric calculator that tells when and where stellar features align at any moment, anywhere on Earth.
So, we headed to the Big Sur Coastline, hoping for no fog or clouds. Upon arriving, we explored all day and set up at dusk near the shore. After many dark hours of stargazing, we walked back for some sleep to our truck, safely left in the locked and gated parking lot, posted as "absolutely no overnight parking."
The Milky Way, shot as a long-exposure photo, is intriguing. The night sky exhibits a banded whitish halo, with our galaxy centered well within the Milky Way. We see a thick disc of millions of stars, clouds of gas, and dust, but light is obscured by all but the closest regions of the galaxy. You can only see a mere one to two thousand light-years in any direction, although the Milky Way is over 100,000 light-years across. Also, it is surprising to witness that the colors of the stars are not all white as perceived. In fact, from cool to hot, the star colors are red, orange, yellow, white, green, and blue.
In our view of shooting the Falls, it is said that Julia Pfeiffer once lived here in a house she built in 1915. The scene from our spot was the same as the one from her tiny bedroom window; I’ve read her walls were painted black. The house burned down many years later, but I felt a connection to the past as we gazed at the same view she once admired. We seemed utterly isolated in the darkness. When I returned home and reviewed the long exposures, I realized we had company. If you peer on the fringe of the cliff in the woods near the falls, there's a faint magical glow from a hidden camper's bonfire. It's a subtle metaphor that reminds us that moments in time are shared by all, whether we know it or not.
