This past March I spent a week travelling around Lake Superior. It happened to be the exact same week I had been up there in 2013, in fact this shot of the night sky was done on the same night 3 years after I had done a similar shot. This time though I was doing a series of time-lapse images of the night sky as part of my project for The Sweetwater Seas – A Documentary About North America’s Great Lakes. In 2013 there was snow and ice with temperatures below 0°F and the lake frozen over with ice. This year it was between 20-35°F and the ice was almost none existent. However, knowing the ice wouldn’t be there, I still wanted to travel around the lake and was hoping to get a few nice time-lapse of the night sky along with time-lapse of clouds and any other subject which drew me in. On a trip like this you hope to come back with at least one good set of images. I was lucky enough to exceed my expectations even though some things didn’t go the way I had hoped. I had only one clear night. I spent hours on the beach at Split Rock State Park in Minnesota shooting the night sky with wolves howling in the distance. It was a beautiful night and morning. For those who don’t know much about time-lapse, first you need to know your frame rate, how long you want the clip to be and then do the computations to figure out how many shots you need over what time period. In the case of these I did a 15 second exposure with 3 seconds in between. So to get 13 seconds of video it took almost 2 hours of shooting. Not a bad way to spend your night…
Lake Superior Night Sky
March 31, 2016
Richard Mack