Star Trails and the Captain’s Ghost
Look closely at
this surreal nightscape.
In the dreamlike scene,
star trails arc over an
old ship run
aground on a beach near Gytheio, Peloponnesus in southern Greece.
Could that be the captain's ghost
haunting
the beach, gazing
forlornly at the decaying wreck,
hovering over starlight reflected in still water?
Actually, the ephemeral shape is the photographer.
Instead of a single long exposure to
record the motion of the
stars as the Earth rotates on its axis,
the picture is composed of 90 consecutive images,
each exposure 90 seconds long.
Digitally stacking the individual exposures then reconstructs
the star trails.
It also creates a ghostly, semi-transparent
figure of the photographer who was captured standing
on the beach in only one of the exposures.
