Utah Monolith and Star Trails at night
And as quickly as the Utah Monolith had appeared within our collective conscious, it was gone. Reports are that sometime on Friday night 11/27/20 the object was surreptitiously removed.
WHY? WHERE DID THE UTAH MONOLITH GO?
I’m guessing it’s sitting covered in a warehouse or auto shop in Moab.
Unfortunately I’d now guess at this point that the reason for the Monolith was to create an internet phenomenon that could somehow be monetized in this day and age of dollars swirling around the clicking of our keyboards. Almost surely the constructor was the de-structor, despite internet stories of hearing radio traffic of a federal agency helicopter removing it while BLM rangers kept people away. Silly. If it were a McCracken-esque artist, I highly doubt that person would have removed the installation so soon after it having been discovered.
It makes far more sense that the first person to rambunctiously document its initial discovery is the person that built it, and is the person who subsequently arranged to have a ‘random’ person quickly ‘discover’ its removal, a person who somehow happened to possess the ability to orchestrate an image likening its disappearance to the object blasting off for the heavens. I have a hard time believing that that was random, nor would I consider it random that the previously alluded-to person that gave us that initial video walk-through happened to possess the skills of being an automotive metal fabricator. That initial video shows a person who seems emphatically interested in showing the object’s construction, and had an almost ‘proud-papa’ affectation toward it.
The only confounding factor with this scenario is that I have some doubt that the person in question could actually have had enough patience to wait four years for someone to find it. That’s a long timeline for a return on one’s ‘investment’ in this age of IADD (internet attention deficit disorder). But, the fact remains that other than (recent) finger/hand/bootprints, the object was clean as a whistle, absent the 4 years of built up dirt, dust and splatter that would inevitably have accumulated over the course of the postulated timeframe.
Then again, who knows?
Image information:
I’m not including technical information on this particular image either, except that its 269 component images took 1h 15m to capture, and several hours to compile into this star trail image. For this image I took some liberties and added a bit of fill light on the backside, just to give the foreground some depth, and to suggest the object’s reflectivity. View is to north, stars rotating around Polaris.
Utah’s Monolith under the North Star, a seemingly incongruent oddity that seizies one’s attention. Does Coriolis Force spin the correct direction here? Is north, north? Why is the ground so incredibly level and flat in this alcove? Who did this?
For you astrophotography lovers out there, perhaps you can spot the other incongruency in the image, some would call a mistake or impossibility, others perhaps technical error by the photographer during processing. Post in comments below if you have a guess, never know what you might get out of it… ;)
Print is available for purchase, please contact me directly. General print prices can be found here, but I will customize a print for a specific location, as needed.
