Star Trails and Contemplative Reflection

The evening sky is beautiful and clear.  Stars from a million light-years away twinkle in the inky night.

And here I am, sitting in St. Agnes Cemetery in a clear May evening.  The moon is new.  The stars are twinkling.  My Nikon D700 is capturing a series of 30-second exposures, which will be assembled into a “star trail” photo once I get back home.

I’m sitting by the camera.  My “Kaptain Kool and the Kongs” AM radio is giving me updates from the overnight sports talk radio shows.  I’m working in almost total blackness.  A couple of cold sandwiches from Stewart’s are at the ready for munching, a couple of cold beverages are nearby for an evening sip.  I even thought about bringing a lawn chair into the cemetery grounds, but that seemed too gauche.

While the camera does its work, I’m staring into the dark sky, trying to remember all the constellations and star patterns from my youth.   I can make out the easy one – Ursa Major, the Big Dipper, and the use of the two stars in the Big Dipper’s front that point to Polaris, the North Star.  I had to angle my Nikon D700 so that when the earth rotates at night, the stars will appear to rotate around Polaris.  And with that, I needed the circles to accentuate something in the cemetery.  That “something” is the marble bust of a saint, watching over a treasured soul in eternal slumber.

You might ask – Chuck, why in the name of all that’s holy are you hanging out at the cemetery?  Are you planning on photographing ghosts or angels?  Are you planning some Satanic ritual involving an animal sacrifice and a couple of cans of Red Bull?

Far from that.  See, every year the Roman Catholic Diocese has a photography contest at St. Agnes Cemetery.  One is allowed to enter a single photograph featuring imagery in the cemetery – whether it’s a picture of a tombstone, the stained glass window of a masoleum, or anything one could possibly find.

After receiving special permission to enter the grounds after hours from from the Cemetery office (and from the Menands Police Department, so that they wouldn’t tow my car away at 3 in the morning), I searched for the perfect location for a long-exposure photograph.  With only the distant lights of downtown Menands providing limited lighting, I set up my camera and tripod.  I composed the scene so that, after an hour’s time, the stars would appear as a nimbus or halo around the marble-carved statue’s head.

I locked the Quantaray shutter release on my Nikon, and let the camera do its work.

I then walked away from the camera and sat down next to a tombstone.  I looked up at the brilliant sky, with its unlimited twinkling stars decorating the heavens.

It’s at times like this that I become reflective of my life.

I think about those who have passed on, as I try to make out the constellations in the sky.  Friends and family members whose time on this earth was all too brief.  Those who came and went so quickly, I never got a chance to properly say goodbye.  Instead, it was, “I’ll see you soon.”

An hour is done.  I took the camera home.  Post-processed the picture.  Stitched one hundred twenty photos together, one on top of the other.  It was a long and arduous process.

And in the end… my test photo came out looking like this.

Not bad for a first try in the cemetery, the star trails turned out better than the previous photographic “star trails” experiment at the Tomhannock Reservoir.  I can either submit this photograph, or I can try this again in a few days, hopefully in mid-June when the moon is new and the skies are clear.  The above photograph was taken in one hour, in a private, quiet location.  It allowed me time to reflect and think.

And I have a feeling I can put together a better shot in the future.  We shall see.