February 25, 2010 Light pillars/River steam
Drove to Blair, NE with Chris Allington around 10pm if I remember right. Did a few star trail images at the river access on the east side of town. There was a bunch of steam coming off the river since the temperatures were near -5F. That image didn't turn out well do to the steam. When stacking star trails in Photoshop using the "lighten" feature makes the sky just look grey. Later on we went out search for light pillars. It was mostly a letdown, but a few big bursts made it worth it.
Thats Chris' Jeep above. That plant in the background is what we think causes the light pillars, still not 100% sure though. Also think that it could have to do with the river steam.
Later we went up to a hill in Blair to see if we could see the light pillars from above. We went up without our gear the first time and it looked sweet with the pillars, then when we got our gear and climbed back up, it sucked lol. But here is a kinda cool image of the snowscaped park in moonlight.
After just a few moments at the top we decided to head back and look for light pillars again. This time we got an even better show! Mike up there on top of that snow pile lol. An incredible sight with the moon right there! We still can't figure out why spaceweather.com hasn't featured these images we've submitted, yet they post crappy out of focus images on a weekly basis lol. I mean its not like they feature light pillars very often, its quite an amazing optical phenomena to witness.
Around this time the moon had set and it was 4:30am. We waited around in a parking lot for the Blair bakery to open at 5am and got some donuts. Excellent donuts. Headed back to the river planning to do a star trail right before morning twilight.
Also check out Chris' images and excellent timelapse video of the star trails here.
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