April 4, 2013 More Death Valley Zodiacal Light (on 11 Mar 2013)

I got my first look at Zodiacal Light back in March, 2010, in southern Death Valley. The skies were VERY dark and transparent, and the ZL was stunning!  Here is the link to those images.  I was in Death Valley again on March 11, 2013.  My buddy Tom Tascone was interested in getting away from the lights of L.A. and to see some really dark night skies, so we drove the five hours from the San Fernando Valley to Stovepipe Wells and north of there another 30 or 40 miles.  We found a spot along Scottys Castle Road near Mesquite Springs Campground, and spotted Comet PanSTARRS as it set not too long after sunset.

There was some cirrus around, mostly to the northwest, at dusk, but it didn’t look extensive enough to be much of an issue.  The sky remained mostly clear and appeared very dark for the next several hours as we photographed the Zodiacal Light and other parts of the night sky.  But, it seemed that the dark night sky was being veiled slightly by some moisture at high levels.  The stars were just not as “stunning” and spectacular as I’ve seen them before.  (Later I checked a water vapor loop for the region, and indeed our area was being affected by a plume of vapor, presumably at high levels.  This didn’t manifest itself as thin cirrus, as far as we could tell, but it did result in less-than-desired transparency.)  Still, it was very dark, and Tom’s SQM instrument registered values of 21.6 or so routinely.

On this night-sky “shoot” I would use my Zeiss 21mm lens exclusively.  Most of the images were about 20 to 60 seconds in duration.  I had my Celestron set up and could piggy-back the Canon 5D Mark II, so many of the images are “tracked” to minimize the star trails.  Faint urban light domes could be picked up by the long exposures towards Vegas and L.A., but were basically invisible to the naked eye.  The very faint phenomenon called “Gegenschein” was barely visible to our eyes…if you used a little imagination and inverted vision.  A couple of my long exposures at the anti-solar point picked up the Gegenschein (9872 and 9883).  As for the Zodiacal Light, it was quite prominent and spectacular, and easily visible to the naked eye!