Salar de Uyuni and The Magellanic Clouds

This was an incredibly windy and cold night, and it was really hard to find a place away from the wind to set up the camera for long exposures. Even with my down jacket, woolen socks, long johns and gloves, I simply had to leave the camera behind and go back to my room to heat up. I eventually fell asleep and woke up at the break of dawn.

Here I was the only guest in what seemed like a ghost village, and as I set up the tripod and camera in the middle of the night I was confident my setup would be untouched by human intervention, at least. As you can see from the photo and the resulting time-lapse it worked out quite OK.

The landscape on a starry night like this is more about the enormous starry sky, than the salt flats. Catching a meteor is an unexpected bonus! Only the open ocean has a wider sky, but there you have a huge amount of moisture creating all sorts of distortions compared to the dry desert air found at this location.

The band of clouds seen here is actually the remains of several thunderstorms, and in the time-lapse you’ll see a lightning on the right side. This is the very beginning of the rainy season, so these storms are slowly coming closer, and in a few weeks they will be right above!