Night Light of the North Coast: Still of the Night

The Milky Way, Jupiter, and Saturn pass above the forest skyline of Douglas-fir trees on July 24, 2020, between 11:15 p.m. and 1:20 a.m. I was photographing at Sol Spirit Farm, a glamping outfit beautifully situated just outside of Willow Creek, California. This time-lapse shows the motion in the sky over the two hours of elapsed time between the first frame and the last.

The stillness of the night is striking, standing beneath the stars in the middle of a windless forest. The silence is complete, motion non-existent, a world frozen in silhouette around you. But it’s an illusion. You trust your senses, yes, but you cannot sense everything in a glance.

Your eyes see much, but there is also much that escapes them completely, especially at night. A glance tells you the stars hang motionless in the sky above the treetops. But are they motionless? Of course not; that is poetry, and you know they move across the sky as the Earth revolves in space. Your eyes won’t see that motion, but watching for a long time might reveal some change in position of the stars relative to things on the ground — a star passing a tree, perhaps — or if you look periodically over time, you might note that they have changed their position from one glance to the next.

The camera can catch motion in either manner, whether watching with a single long exposure as the stars’ motion turns them to streaks across the sky, or by capturing their motion in a series of stills over time that can be played back as a movie, known as time-lapse. The camera shows the motion differently for each method. Particularly with night photography, the eye of a camera will see things in a different way, providing a view of the world that your eyes cannot see.

The time-lapse I’m presenting here was created from a series of still photographs I shot across a skyline of Douglas-fir trees on July 24, 2020, between 11:15 p.m. and 1:20 a.m. I was out at Sol Spirit Farm, a glamping outfit beautifully situated just outside of Willow Creek, California. In all, there were 282 individual photographs. When strung together like the frames of a movie, the series of photographs becomes a movie themselves, a time-lapse movie, that shows the motion in the sky over the two hours of elapsed time between the first frame and the last.

A meteor flashes by, the Milky Way extends into the sky from behind a Douglas-fir skyline, while Jupiter and the dimmer Saturn peer down from low over the treetops. This is a still from a time-lapse I shot while glamping at Sol Spirit Farm outside of Willow Creek, California. July 24, 2020.

To read previous entries of “Night Light of the North Coast,” click on my name above the article. To keep abreast of my most current photography or purchase a print, visit and contact me at my website mindscapefx.com, or follow me on Instagram at @david_wilson_mfx and on Twitter @davidwilson_mfx.