After years of hiatus, I had to come back and blog about this wonderful experience I had over the weekend in the North Georgia mountains. For eons, since I was on Instagram, the one thing which I always wanted to do was to capture the stars and eventually, the milky way itself. There were many posts that would come across my Instagram feed for a while, but I never really got serious about taking the path of star chasing until last year when I happened to travel to Utah in May and then to Yellow stone in September.
But even before my adventures around the American southwest, there was one blog that I came across as I was still researching about designated dark spots in and around the Atlanta area, and that's when I came across Prashanth Naik's Naikon Pixels He is known by the same name on the Insta as well.
So back to the weekend adventure.. The best time to capture the stars is always around Newmoon days, and for me last year was perfect timing during my travels to Monument valley and yellow stone. I also happen to reach out to Prashanth to tag along if he was ever back again in Georgia. He buzzed me over IG and I also wanted to make sure my hiking buddies Yasin and Angel could come along.
We start around 10.30 PM from North Atlanta, the drive to Brasstown bald felt like forever although it was probably 70 miles away (Courtesy of Country Roads which were serpentine). On the way to the mountain, I almost hit a black bear which was galloping across the road!
Around 12.30 AM, we reach the parking lot on the mountain, only to be welcomed by dark skies and the twinkling stars. It was a dark night but the stars were conspicuous with their presence everywhere. It felt as though a big black carpet was covering the sky with led lights twinkling here and there. The hike to the observation tower on the summit was not that long - only 0.5 miles, but I dreaded heading up the hiking trail considering the bear encounter which we had earlier on the way. We were 4 folks in total, so with our headlights switched on, and all the gear, we started to hike. It was a tough one considering the cold, the wind, and then the eerie silence of the night - engulfing us along the way to the summit.
We settled down around the observatory and wanted to take a few sample shots, but soon, the cold weather had overpowered us and it was becoming impossible to handle the camera and stay comfortable. But my zeal to get through the night increased when I was told that 5 AM would be the ideal time to capture the milky way while it would come up above the horizon onto the mountain. This thought kept me going, in the meanwhile, I tried capturing star trails or the stars in general via the time-lapse option on my camera. Apparently, I never used this option before so it was a perfect time to test out that feature. A continuous recording of 1.45 hours boiled down to 10 seconds of timelapse. I liked the end result!
Although we spent 8 hours in the cold under the stars, it felt like an eternity, because we also had another plan to capture the sunrise before heading back. Once I had the timelapse in place, I realized my camera's battery was almost running out, it was a now or never situation. It was 5.13 AM already, I quickly ran across the observation deck with my tripod and camera, made sure I had what I wanted in the visor, and took some shots. I was not disappointed! The stars aligned for me on this night for sure!
With the milky way shots on my SD card, it was another long wait for the sunrise to happen which wouldn't until around 7.30 am. This second wait was painstakingly difficult and we literally were counting time and cursed ourselves for what we had gotten ourselves into. The below photo explains it all. We are wrapped up in our sleeping bags all night
I've seen sunrises before in Florida almost every day, but watching a sunrise from Georgia's highest point was something else. The transition from night to day happened even before we could fathom the crazy night we have been through for the last 8 hours. We were all glued towards the east, and by this time, other people started coming up to do the same thing. And then it happened... another to-do item cross-checked out of my bucket list.
