To South Dakota, Again

I thought I could see aurora again last weekend, and decided to drive back to Mitchell on Saturday.

On the way there, I stopped by the Great Plains Zoo again. Still didn't see the Pallas Cat, though saw the snow leopard this time. So that's a plus. After leaving the zoo, I decided to drive through Sioux Falls proper, and saw the nice old courthouse they had, and drove in circles a few times trying to figure out a good way to get to the (very contained) titular falls, to no success.

And I also rectified a mistake I made on my previous trip: Not stopping to see the Corn Palace. It was corny, however. Then a hotel check in, and around dusk, drove north a bit to somewhere that looked good on the light pollution map. And had another night of disappointment. Did get a pretty good timelapse out of it though.

Made from 13 second exposures taken over about two hours. I should probably look at turning off the auto noise reduction thing on my camera next time I do this, since after a long exposure, it'll take another exposure of the same length with the shutter closed, to get what the sensor noise looks like. For doing interval shooting like this, I can probably just take the dark frame manually and and deal with it in post. That would let me double my "framerate".

Next morning, I decided to make a few detours. The first was to Pipestone National Monument in Minnesota, because why not visit Minnesota on a whim. Along the way I found photographer bait: A bunch of windmills on display.

At Pipestone itself, they had a nice waterfall, and I tried my hand with long-ish exposure just relying on OSS and my elbows on a railing, for a quarter second exposure by hand, it turned out pretty good.

Then south from there, I stopped at a little marker that was at the corner of Iowa, South Dakota and Minnesota. For some reason, people write their names on rocks and leave it along the backside of the marker.

Then after that, the long, long drive back to Kansas City, finally getting home at like 7PM.