After 11 days on the road (including 5 days at the Telluride Blues & Brews Festival), we had one more day of clear skies so decided to stop for one last night before returning home. Kebler Pass is a frequent stop for leaf-peepers, though this summer’s odd monsoon cycle and high temperatures at altitude seem to be delaying the changing colors of the aspen a bit. Commonly known as ‘The Seven Sisters’, the Pleiades is an open star cluster 444 light years away, and is in fact the closest star cluster to Earth. These relatively young stars are blue in color, and shine through interstellar dust that looks like a bluish veil when captured with a long enough exposure. The California Nebula can be seen as a reddish smear in the upper left, while the greenish and red skies are due to airglow.
The image above was cropped from a large panorama consisting of three vertical rows of 11 images shot with a 105mm lens, and took about 35 minutes to capture in the field. The full 95×56″ image shows vehicles parked at the Horse Ranch Park Trailhead, where a trail spur leads to the Dyke trail, which originates at Lake Irwin and allows both hikers and mountain bikes. A portent of the season to come, the winter star Capella (third brightest in the northern hemisphere) can be seen rising over the southern flank of 12,644′ Ruby Peak:
