The Mountain

Terje Sorgjerd, who created last month's awesome video of the Northern Lights, has done it again: another great video, this one filmed on 12,000+ ft stratovolcano Pico del Teide in the Canary Islands. Terje writes:

This was filmed between 4th and 11th April 2011. I had the pleasure of visiting El Teide.
Spain´s highest mountain @(3715m) is one of the best places in the world to photograph the stars and is also the location of Teide Observatories, considered to be one of the world´s best observatories.

The goal was to capture the beautiful Milky Way galaxy along with one of the most amazing mountains I know El Teide.

Read more here. Oh, and play the vid on full screen — it's beautiful.



H/T: the most excellent Starts With A Bang, who knows a thing or two about the night sky.

Magic in the sky on a cloudy night

Milky Way through Scorpio (Mesr Village, Dasht-e-kavir, Iran) by Alireza Teimoury on Flickr.

That's downtown L.A. to the left [by Joits on Flickr]. Bright lights all night long and not a star in sight: "Just us, the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!"

Great place to look at the night sky: the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, on a road south of Second Mesa. Especially after you've stood for hours on a Shongopovi rooftop watching the conclusion of Niman [the Going Home ceremony], and after you've enjoyed a fine dinner with a Hopi family and friends. I never expect the stars to be aligned like that again.

A Southern California suburb, on the other hand, is not the best place to look for the Milky Way. Just saying. Not that we don't look up and hope, night after night. And once in a while something amazing happens: it's after dark, there's heavy cloud cover, I'm outside with the dogs and from far above, faint but just loud enough to recognize, come the calls of geese flying north. Time's arrow, time's cycle.