My favorite National Park is undoubtedly Arches National Park near Moab Utah. The last time I visited the park it was very hazy and smoky due to the California wildfires. However this time that I returned in the summer of ’24 the skies were clear and pristine, and I knew I would be able to get some great Milky Way shots through the arches and behind some of the great rock formations.
My favorite destination in Arches has always been Balanced Rock, so I set forth to capture a polar star trail behind this interesting rock formation.
We parked at the Balanced Rock parking area and hauled all the camera gear and tripods in a wagon down the path and out to Balanced Rock; maybe 200 yards. Luckily there was a nice flat area directly to the south of the rock, so that I could set up my Canon 6D and tripod such that I could position Polaris right above the rock. The shape of the rock is different from the southern perspective; it looks more like an Easter Island Moai Head.
We arrived kind of late and it was already nearly dark. I was concerned that I would not be able to get a good landscape shot, but with the help of a few long-exposure high-ISO shots I was able to get some detail in the rocks.
For the next three and a half hours I let the camera capture 2 minute images, until finally the last quarter moon started to rise, around 1 AM, illuminating the east side of the rock. At that point I had to adjust down the ISO settings on my Canon 6D to keep the light balanced. Overall, I captured 111 two-minute frames.
It was certainly eerie sitting out in the desert by ourselves, but we had no issues at all. Occasionally we would see some flashlights in the adjacent rock area, but no one approached us. It was a very relaxing and very silent evening. There was no wind, so all that one could hear were cars occasionally driving down the main park road. The light from Moab, only about 5 miles away, definitely brightened the sky. I would estimate that Arches NP is Bortle 3; it’s not nearly as dark as the nearby Capitol Reef NP. But still very dark!
Image Setup and Processing for the Polar Star Trail & Landscape Shot
Since we did arrive late, I had to take several images at ISO 12,800 of Balanced Rock and the foreground landscape. It would be a little noisy so I would have to run the image through a DeNoise process. All images were taken with the Canon 6D with a 16-35 f/2.8L lens (set at 16mm).
I took the 111 frames and ran them through an app called StarStax (on the Mac) which generated the star trails from the individual two-minute images. This produced the actual star trail image. After bringing down the brightness on the star trail (there was so much Milky Way in there!), I pulled the two images into PhotoShop, cut the sky out of the landscape foreground image, and layered it in front of the star trail image. This yielded a nicely lit foreground with the spectacular star trail in the sky.
The nice thing about doing a star trail is that you can create a timelapse movie to add some motion.
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