Photographer captures Milky Way in Atacama Desert (Plus Benro Giveaway!)

okay guys welcome to the Atacama Desert one of the best places in the world for astrophotography and astronomy and it's also the driest place on planet Earth so first night here but it's already morning now it's about 2:00 a.m. and we've come to a hostel salah which means the eyes of the salt plain it's basically to almost perfectly round freshwater lakes right in the middle of the desert it's so bizarre so me and Adrian have taken one each east time-lapse in over there I'm grabbing some shots here so just a lot I do a panorama which is why I've got the nodal rail to make the panorama stitching easier and we barrel mark three tripod has got a spirit level on the legs so I'm gonna level the tripod nice and easy I'm gonna get cracking with this panorama and I shall show it to you guys right now [Music] so maybe I'm just doing a bit of date I was going and we stayed in the San Pedro area because some Pedro is 2,400 meters up so it's just above the threshold of altitude sickness but both of us are feeling a little bit weak Adrian's a little bit lightheaded my heart rates definitely faster than it normally is so we're gonna spend a couple of days easier just to convert eyes before we start going up to high altitudes and better locations but basically anything and everything near San Pedro de Atacama you have to pay for if it's a lagoon if there's a lake a simple viewpoints you have to pay for it it's really really frustrating and these places get absolutely locked down at night I appreciate these guys have gotten like tourism is pretty much the only thing they've got going for them Brits he was too aggressively commercialized like paying just review point is just weird [Music] so ages oh so time rhapsode I'm just chillin in the car because I'm not feeling that good I think the altitudes Games meets like four thousand two hundred years which is higher but I've ever been lost on ground probably doesn't help though it's already quite ill and poorly but this sinus infection a little bit of a fever so I have me up to shave in the past few days we've got the oxygen tanks just in case it does get really bad but ya don't know just give it put my head down tried a little sleep see if I feel any better okay so hopefully story short last night I was not good the altitude sickness hit me quite hard my fingers just went numb my muscles were teeming I have zero energy to move or do anything my brain felt like he was being squeezed and I just wanted to curl up into a little ball and die basically but yeah as the night went on I just got more and more nauseous so we eventually came back down to San Pedro which is 2,400 meters and I just went straight to sleep woke up this morning feeling pretty fine so quick recovery which is good and then today we decided we were going to go a little bit higher with the intention of like going straight back down just a sort of trick the body into acclimatizing for that kind of altitude and then coming back down to spend the night at like 3,000 meters which we're hoping we're kind of ready for now but as soon as we got to about 5,000 meters it is adrianne like a brick wall and he couldn't breathe and he was in a bit of a panic and yeah really not good so we came back down immediately he's now recovering you know a little rest in his room over there but he was fine once we got back down to sort of a normal altitude of 2,400 so hopefully he'll be okay for tonight [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] in the North American they below on the horizon I want to take advantage of a longer focal and so I pulled up the moonship will start trucker when I was using the barrel geared head as a month to do the polar alignment [Music] hey guys so far so it had about three thousand eight enemy is no signs of any altitude sickness feels really really good to be out shooting and feeling good hmm anyway come back to a candy and nobody found on the drive the other day I really want to get a huge panorama here so I'm going to use the 360 panoramic head hopefully make a 360 then if not at least a huge panorama of the Milky Way over this Canyon and I'll have the Magellanic Clouds on the left and the Andromeda galaxy on the right so all of the four visible naked-eye galaxies in one single panorama and hopefully a pretty awesome for Gontier this Asian said never time-lapse [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] and now we've come to a spot that we found in the daytime yesterday maybe the day before it's a really nice gorge with a river running through it with lots of cacti and we knew it would be the last stop of the night because the Milky Way the very last for a couple of hours of darkness it gets really low on the horizon in the West and this Gorge is so west facing so now we've come here the Milky Way is sinking into the gorge perfectly and here this is gonna be a wicked end to - an awesome night [Music] so we couldn't go anywhere last night because we actually blew a tire on the car going to one of the lagoons so we took it to a tire shop quickly but they couldn't repair it so we have to wait today so that we could go back to the rental company in Kalama so we lost today we lost in light but we've now just found this incredible place called valle de la our values which means valley of the rainbow the colors here are saved [Music] really surprised that there's no security or gates or anything keeping you out of this place like everywhere else we've been it's huge it's absolutely huge so many possibilities I wish we found it earlier because now the night sky is currently been taken over by the moon but uh I think this place will still be pretty damn good for some moonscapes we'll still get a little bit of Milky Way action anyway but the the entire landscape is sparkling there's rock I think it's gypsum rock and you can't see on the video that well but the the entire place is just sparkling and twinkling it's really beautiful I'm hoping the moonlight catches it later on tonight you can see it but it's of glass sprinkle all over the entire landscape but it has been raining in glass it's incredible [Music] even though it's a quarter wound you can still see some your easy detail in the Milky Way we've got the Cygnus region of the Milky Way which is upside down to what I'm normally used to you we've got this nice sort of almost looks like lava flow on the ground and then these insane plans in the mountain there and again that moonlights just catching it nicely making it look super 3d so yeah just gonna get this shot quickly but to be honest kind of looking forward to moon [Music] move out of the way in the milky way overhead I really wanted to take a tracked panorama of the Milky Way core and get some nice detail with a 50 millimeter lens I was using the move shoot move tracker again and also the barrel geared head as a monk to do the polar aligning and I found it way better than a ball head as he were able to adjust the axes in my new - just once with no sagging there are also degree markings on each dial - so you can set your latitude on the y-axis and you know you're at the right height which was especially useful given that there's no equivalent to the North Star Polaris in the southern hemisphere Oh guys welcome to Laguna ball two notches Laguna Escondida the so-called secret lagoons they are still a bit of a touristy place but it's less and visited than all of the other lagoons and it's right out the way it's a 40 kilometer pretty much straight road across the salt flats the most boring monotonous Road I think I've ever been on but it is exactly where we had a tire puncture a few days ago but we've decided to come back from the night and we're at the end of our trip now we got two nights left so the moon is really starting to take over the night sky but it does have its advantages it does mean that we can come here and scout at nighttime because we haven't been yet during the daytime and I've got a pretty big give us moon now hanging in a dark place like this you really appreciate how bright the moon is you know you can see for her and wide we've been walking without our head torches the gate was closed to the sight so he was a 2 kilometer and a half kilometer walk to actually get to the start of the lagoons yeah just look around you know have a little scout find the best lagoon because there's a few here and the good opportunity tonight where the moon will set and the Milky Way will be arching over the moon sets I'm hoping to get a nice little panorama with the moon set in the Milky Way arch and when he ever done it once and that was in La Palma so I'm hoping to do it again here in Chile fingers crossed so the moon set down here and the Milky Way is gonna be arching across yeah so I think there's a really good spot for the panorama you got this Lagoon activism needed loyal to the moon set and then across the Milky Way arch just framing everything nicely this has got very good potential right so set up the 360 panel head that's gonna make the panoramas a lot quicker and easier which is crucial because the moon is gonna be setting very quickly but I'm starting to think it's not gonna be possible to get the set in moon with the Milky Way arch the moon right now is a waxing gibbous moon it's 81% illuminated so it's quite big and I think the Milky Way is gonna shine through because the air is quite clear so even though the moon sets it's not gonna fade that much it's not gonna dip that much and there's also some mountains on the horizon so it's gonna set below the mountains before I even gets a chance to get quite dim so I know either way I'm just going to do a quick simple panorama of this lagoon with the moonlight and if I can't do the panorama with the moon and the Milky Way I'll just wait for the moon to set and then do panorama of the Milky Way arch on its own it's not the end of the world [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] it's dead still here the reflections look absolutely amazing but there's not a single one with a wind [Music] [Music] and that's pretty much what I stopped vlogging well now it's time for we give you a courtesy of Benro you could win a Bama ogeid head along with a mark 3 tripod to combine it with and all you have to do is let me know in the comments below the three different ways I used the Ben rugged head in my three vlogs from Chile this episode's answer should be easy so long as you were tracking along closely but go check out my previous vlogs the one with the total solar eclipse and the one from the Alma Observatory as well and let me know the three different use cases I made of the geared head by getting in the comments on this video a winner with the correct answer will be picked at random so good luck and clear skies [Music]

Channel: Alyn Wallace

Views: 69,568

Keywords: astrophotography, chile, atacama, milky way, panorama, san pedro de atacama, night sky, sony, long exposure, ojos del salar, valle de arcoiris

Id: vwQlKYr2wKY

Length: 19min 47sec (1187 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 22 2019