Three photos show nighttime landscapes with dramatic rock formations, each featuring swirling, hourglass-shaped light trails in the sky, created by long-exposure photography. The scenes have a surreal, luminous effect.Elliot McGucken

These photos of 70-foot-tall light cones shimmering over the Californian desert may look beautiful, but scratch the surface and they actually represent fascinating theories about the space-time continuum.

Dr. Elliot McGucken is a well-known landscape photographer and a Ph.D. physicist. He likes to combine his two passions, which he believes perfectly complement each other.

“The legendary Renaissance painter Rembrandt van Rijn advised aspiring artists to ‘choose only one master: nature’,” McGucken notes in his paper on light cones. “Einstein also looked towards nature for enlightenment, advising scientists to, ‘Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better’.”

“All too much of modern art and science has lost touch with nature’s truth and beauty,” he adds. “And so it is that I created my Light Cone Spacetime Sculptures upon nature’s exalted easel.”

Rocks and shrubs under a night sky with distant mountains; spiral patterns of light trail upward in the air, creating a glowing vortex effect above the landscape.

Rocky, desert landscape under a blue, cloudy sky at night. In the sky above the rock formations, a spiral pattern of white lights forms a double-cone shape, resembling a vortex or hourglass.

Red rock formations are illuminated under a night sky, with swirling white light trails hovering above, creating a mesmerizing spiral pattern. Some clouds drift across the sky, and the unique landscape stands out dramatically.

Red and white rock formations under a dark blue night sky, with two spiral light trails floating above the landscape, creating a surreal and otherworldly scene.

McGucken captures the light cones via three-minute exposures, during which time a drone is released to paint the massive spirals that are about 40 feet wide. Each light painting looks like an hourglass, and that’s because it is actually two cones on top of each other, with the narrower end of each cone meeting in the middle.

The photographer-come-physicist uses GPS to guide the drone via a pre-programmed route. McGucken usually needs multiple attempts — sometimes over numerous nights — because the wind can push the drone off its path, particularly when shooting in a desert where there is often a blowing gust.

A spiral trail of lights swirls above a coastal scene at dusk, featuring a tall, narrow stone tower by rocky cliffs and a misty shoreline, with a distant town illuminated under a moody sky.

A natural rock arch under a starry night sky, with glowing spiral light trails above it, creating a futuristic effect. The landscape is illuminated, highlighting red rock formations and scattered vegetation.

A tall rock formation stands beneath a star-filled night sky, with long-exposure light trails forming a cone shape above its peak, creating a surreal, glowing effect. A winding path leads toward the formation.Sometimes McGucken creates just a single cone, instead of two.

Rock formations under a starry night sky, with spiral-shaped light trails hovering above, creating a glowing cone effect in the sky. The landscape appears arid with sparse vegetation.

A night sky over rocky terrain shows spiraling light trails creating a tornado-like shape, with stars scattered across the deep blue sky and mountains in the background.

To the casual observer, McGucken’s light cones are just a pretty curiosity — an aesthetically pleasing spiral over stunning nighttime landscapes. But there’s more than meets the eye.

PetaPixel does not usually get into the weeds of the theory of relativity, but McGucken’s light cones actually represent Albert Einstein’s equation relating light, time, and dimension: x4=ict.

In an article from 2023, Smithsonian writer Will Sullivan explains that the cones represent how light moves through the space-time continuum, a model first theorized by German mathematician Hermann Minkowski.

Imagine a light bulb turning on. To the human eye, light fills the room instantaneously, but that’s not what happens. A fraction of a second after the light bulb turns on, a small sphere is illuminated around the bulb. When another fraction of a second passes, the light travels a little further, forming a bigger sphere.

The Smithsonian explains that “light cones track the spread of light in two-dimensional space, emanating out in wider and wider circles around a central point.”

Sullivan asks the reader to think of it like a stone that’s been dropped in a still pond: “As time passes, ripples spread farther and farther across the surface of the water. In two dimensions, light from a bulb will fill increasingly larger circles as time goes by,” he explains.

Therefore, the narrowest part of McGucken’s cones represents light from the recent past that is located nearby, while the wider parts of the cones represent light that has come from much farther away.

A rocky beach at night with a spiral pattern of blue and red light drawn in the sky, likely from a long-exposure photo of a drone, reflected on the wet sand below.

Alien desert landscape at night with rocky, layered hills, illuminated in orange and yellow hues, and swirling spiral light trails rising into the dark blue sky.

A tall rock spire stands in a desert landscape at night, with light trails forming spirals above and below its peak; distant cliffs are illuminated under a starry sky.

A rocky desert landscape under a deep blue night sky, with mountains in the background. Glowing spiral light trails rise above the rocks, creating a mesmerizing pattern above the horizon.

Rocks and shrubs under a night sky, with spiraling rings of light forming an hourglass shape above the landscape; mountains are faintly visible in the background.

“The first thing you have to accomplish is a sense of beauty,” McGucken tells Smithsonian. “You owe that to the viewer before you start giving them any sort of physics lecture. I want people to see the desert landscape at night, and then see the light cone, and then start wondering, ‘What is that? What does it mean?’”

To read more about the science behind McGucken’s light cones, head to his Medium page, where there is a fuller explanation. More of his work can be found on Instagram and his website.

Image credits: Photographs by Elliot McGucken