Take an easy hike to spectacular overlook in Zion National Park with 360-degree views. The image below is a 230-degree crop.

The Timber Creek Overlook

Last month, I hiked up to one of my favorite spots along the Timber Creek Overlook trail in Kolob Canyons (Zion National Park) to catch the last light of day.

To get to Kolob Canyons take exit 40 off I-15 between St. George, Utah and Cedar City, Utah. You do need a national park pass, but the entrance is not manned, so it’s more of an honor system entrance. There is a ranger station at the entrance to pay your fee. I have an annual pass.

The Kolob Canyons road is often closed in the Winter beyond the first set of trails. With heavy snow, everything may be completely closed.

The Timber Creek trail starts at a parking lot where the road dead ends at the top. It’s a short half-mile hike each way to a stunning overlook.

I was fortunate to see anticrepuscular rays (sometimes called “antisolar beams” or “anti-sunset rays”) about 15 minutes after sunset.

The anticrepuscular rays are the faint, pinkish-purple streaks and beams you see radiating from the center area of my image.

What Are Anticrepuscular Rays?

Anticrepuscular rays are the shadows of clouds or mountains cast away from the setting sun, appearing to converge on the antisolar point (the exact opposite direction from the sun in the sky).

The center of the lead image, the anti-solar point, is facing due west, right before the March equinox.

The rays look like light beams, but they are actually shadows created when the low sun shines through gaps in clouds or behind mountain ridges. The rays appear to converge in the west because of perspective, just like railroad tracks seem to meet in the distance.

The pink/magenta color comes from the sunlight being heavily scattered and filtered by the long path through the atmosphere.

The lead image above is my final cropped image ( about 230°). The image below is the ultimate super-wide twilight panorama, a full 360° sweep stitched from many frames.

Full 360° Panorama

The image above is greater than 360°, purposely, to show how everything stitches together. By greater than 360° I mean there is overlap on each end. Look carefully and you can see the extreme right and extreme left of the image line up.

This is the view you would see if you spun yourself totally around and stitched everything together properly.

This was one of those shoots where everything came together — soft twilight light on the red rocks, a clear sky, almost no wind, and beautiful Anticrepuscular Rays.

Importantly, there was only one other person there. That’s not likely, especially during Spring break, because this is popular trail.

The next night, there were over 15 people milling about making a 360° shot impossible.

Photographer’s Notes

• This is a vertical stitch with a 20 millimeter lens on a Canon EOS R5 II.
• The overlap between each set of images was about 50 percent.
• By each “set” I mean that took three images of each portion, focusing on the foreground, middle, and distant background. That means about 50 images went into the full composite.
• I blended each set of three in Photoshop so that everything was sharp.
• I then blended those intermediate results in an app called PTGui.
• You cannot do this all at once. I processed approximately 220° from the focus-stacked output, once swinging right and then once swinging left. Thus I had two halves from PTGui.
• I then blended those PTGui halves in Photoshop to make the final 360° stitch.
• It is imperative to keep your tripod perfectly level for these shots.
• Finally, none of this would have stitched together properly without using a nodal slide rail, describe below.

Nodal Slide Rail Notes

A nodal slide is a special bracket that mounts between your tripod head and camera. It allows you to slide the camera forward or backward so that the lens rotates around its nodal point (the optical center of the lens) instead of around the tripod head.

When shooting panoramas (especially with wide lenses), rotating the camera without a nodal slide causes parallax errors — nearby objects (like trees or rocks) shift position between frames, making stitching difficult or impossible. A nodal slide eliminates that parallax, so the images stitch together cleanly and accurately.

There are no parallax errors at infinity, but I had close up rocks that would not have stitched together correctly.

My Panorama Setup

That image may look more complicated than it really is.

There are other methods, but if you are taking panoramas with wide angles, the setup shown or equivalent method is needed to correct for parallax.

My everyday normal setup is the half ball leveling base (any brand would work), with the DT-03R on top. Without the nodal rail, this weighs slightly less than a good ball head.

A full ball head is a bit easier to work with until you want to do a pano. I typically do not know in advance, so my normal setup handles everything. I keep the rail in my pack. With the RRS attachment, the whole nodal slide rail is only 6.2 ounces.

The DT-03 series only tilts up and down. When tilted up or down, a ball head will have generally serious issues when you pan, even with a nodal slide. The one-direction tilt on top a level base will keep things constant as you pan.

Do not get a DT-03 model with a quick release clamp. The quick release clamp has serious issues.

The DT03-R has an additional panning clamp that is only usable if you are perfectly level (no tilt of the DT-03) Otherwise use the bottom panning clamp.

Be sure to center the focusing ring of your camera AND the L-Bracket marks as shown.

Panorama Process

• Get the tripod reasonablty level.
• Level the leveling base using the bubble. Be precise here.
• Attach the nodal slide
• Attach camera to the nodal slide.
• Center the mark on the L-Bracket to the center mark of the nodal slide.
• Slide the rail with camera attached so the focusing ring of the lens is centered over the tripod.
• Start taking pictures.
• Focus stack if needed.
• Rotate to the next spot, overlapping 50 percent.

Finally, this works at normal distances. Don’t expect to use this with an 11-mm lens three inches away from a kitchen counter top.

A 360° Double Arch Milky Way

Hold on, I’m not done yet.

I set out to capture a 360° double arch Milky Way image. First you need the land images, described above. Then you blend in Milky Way images.

A double arch Milky Way is a blend of a summer arch and a winter arch. A double arch can only be taken in a very small window during a new moon in March. The resultant image is a full 360°.

Other than March, one of the arches is too low on the horizon, if not nonexistent.

The Winter arch in March is visible shortly after sunset (about 9:30 PM in my time zone). Then the standard summer milky way comes out about 3:30 AM but peaks at at about 5:30 AM just before the start of the blue hour.

Yes, it was a very long night. And it greatly adds to the complexity of what I mentioned above.

I’ll share more about how to capture a double arch Milky Way in my next post.

Next Up

I have been promising a post on the super bloom 2026 images from Death Valley National Park, but I dropped everything to process these images. I have not tried 360° panoramas before. Editing these images took a long time.

After part two of this post, a 360° Milky Way panorama, I will finally get to the Death Valley super bloom images I captured in February and March.

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