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The image: Milky Way over Comb Ridge.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the desert under various phases of the moon lately, and Father Sky never seems to disappoint. This last new moon cycle found me underneath incredibly fine conditions for shooting; both transparency and clarity of the air provided ‘seeing’ conditions that I may never have witnessed in my life. Once the galactic center of the Milky Way rose, it actually cast a diffuse shadow, which I could clearly see while passing one hand in front of another.

I personally think as people interested in the environment and as photographers we take for granted the highways, roads and trails we routinely use to access what would otherwise be inaccessible areas. Most people would never consider ‘dispersed’ camping 100 meters off a state highway, and yet three nights of this trip were spent under said conditions: at Moki Dugway, Comb Ridge, and lastly on Red Mountain Pass up at 11,000′. They were great experiences, far better than the night I spent at Goosenecks State Park Campground, although the shade structure over the picnic table did provide a rather solid hammock support! The composite image below is of one of this country’s amazing pieces of road, UT State Highway 95 cutting through Comb Ridge near Blanding, UT, including the light trails of the few cars who drove by while I was capturing the blue-hour images used to increase foreground details a bit:

The Milky Way over Comb Ridge, Utah:

 

I spent this particular night overlooking the highway a few hundred meters from my ‘camp’, and it was windless and completely quiet, except for the occasional car (which could only be heard once it got down to the bottom of the valley floor). Once it started to get dark, I started hearing a strange, metallic ‘pinging’ sound that I couldn’t immediately identify. I finally figured out that the 1/2-mile+ long guardrail on the road was cooling, and contracting; as the ‘pings’ occurred, the sound came from behind this view, and literally shot down into the valley, in a sort of three-dimensional ‘natural surround sound’ effect that was stunning.

 

Lest you think the ridgeline in the Milky Way image is not formidable, here is the view from within the roadcut, looking down on my shooting location in the valley below:

 

As I waited for the Milky Way to rise I shot some images of the Lagoon Nebula using a 70-200/2.8 lens. The images below were more of a test, as to do this right you really need a star-tracker, a rabbit hole I’m not yet ready to go down. But, it does illustrate the value in using multiple consecutive images to both reduce noise and give more latitude to bring out details in the night sky. The first image is straight out of the camera:

And this image is a stack of 11 images, exhibiting much less noise and significant detail in the dust lanes and stars of this section of the Milky Way:

Lastly, the Sky Safari screenshot I used months ago for the planning of this image: