Star Trails Over 4S Ranch in San Diego
Image by slworking2
Tonight I met up with a friend to shoot some star trails from Black Mountain. Being suburbia, the light pollution was pretty bad, but at least around the Black Mountain Open Space Preserve, the sky was somewhat darker. This is a stacked exposure of 74 x 60 sec f/4.0 ISO 100 shot with a Canon EOS R and Canon 17-40mm f/4L lens. It’s quite a challenge to capture star trails in suburbia and balance the exposure between showing off the stars while not blowing out the light pollution from cars, streetlights, etc. towards the end of this exposure, the humidity shot way up and cased the starburst / glare effects see towards the lower right.
4S Ranch is a locale of San Diego County, California. It is located about 25 miles north of downtown San Diego and 13 miles east of the Pacific Ocean in the North County Inland area of San Diego. To the east of 4S Ranch is the San Diego community of Rancho Bernardo. To the west is the Santa Fe Valley, which includes Rancho Santa Fe. Lake Hodges forms the northern border of the community while Black Mountain Ranch, which includes Del Sur and Santaluz, and Rancho Peñasquitos are both situated to the south.
The origin of the name 4S Ranch is not specifically known. The first recorded owner of Rancho San Bernardo, as the area in which 4S Ranch is currently located and originally part of 4 separate sitios or square leagues, was acquired by an English sea captain named Joseph Snook "Captain Snook" (who later became a Mexican citizen and changed his name to Jose Francisco Snook) in 1842 and 1845 through land grants from the Mexican Governor of California. Many now believe the "S" in 4S Ranch stands for "Snook". The "4" may stand for "4 Snooks", after Snook and his three brothers or the 4 sitios or leagues granted to Snook. Contrary to myth, Snook and his wife never had any children. After his death, Snook’s heirs sold the property to James McCoy for ,020.
The above two paragraphs are from Wikipedia, but now I will add my own history. Sometime in the mid 1990s, I remember seeing a stray cow standing in the middle of Camino del Norte near the I-15 freeway ramps in this neighborhood. There were several San Diego Sheriff and CHP cruisers surrounding the cow. The cops were eyeing the cow, but didn’t seem to know how to deal with it. As I recall, eventually a cowboy showed up to retrive the cow and get it off the road. It’s a fun – but true – story I’ve been telling real estate agents when I’m hired to photograph some of the homes in this area. The cows and farms are all long gone now.
