Astro Bloggin: J-Tree

The plan was pretty flawless. All month I had planned to shoot over in Joshua Tree for the new moon weekend, with me driving out there after work on Friday, shoot for a few hours until the core started to disappear, sleep in the Ryan Campground, and drive back home in the AM. I had two sites picked out to shoot at: an abandoned car by the Baker Dam and the Cholla Cactus Garden, where I usually can find one or two nice compositions.

The first kink in my plans came early in the week when my boss asked if I could work a later shift during this week as we ramp up production, 2p-10p. Im somewhat of a sucker(or team player, depending on your optimism level) so I say ‘yeah sure thing boss’. Well this put a hitch into things. The core is brightly visible at 10pm and it’s kind of the ideal time to shoot this time of year, and it takes two hours to get to the park from work. I’ll let you do the math that shows that I would in fact be later than expected in my arrival. Ahh well. Push through it, drive out right after work and get there around midnight for a more condensed night…and that’s what I did. I got on my horse and boogied out to the park, making it through the gates at 11:40pm.

There was a lot of people there. And not just for midnight on a Friday night. I’ve been to the Tree 10+ times in the past few years, with 5 of those trips being astrophoto trips, so I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the busier times in and around the park. I’ve never seen it that crowded during the day, and again, this was at midnight. The front entrance had their small parking lot full where the restroom is, I passed probably 15-20 cars pulled off on the side of the park road, every exhibit had a good chunk of people there as well. I guess everyone had a similar plan as I did, to just enjoy the desert sky, unobstructed by moonlight.

I got to my first location near the abandoned car only to find out that area is a day use only area. Well shoot. Chalk that up to bad planning on my part. That’s on me. I had to call an audible, so I shifted plans to drive up the gravel Queen Valley Road to find a new composition. A lot of astrophotographers will tell you how important it is to find your compositions during the daylight and come back to them at dark, but I personally have never done this…and this is probably why I’m never all that happy with my compositions (hah).

REGARDLESS, I set up shop along that road and found a nice Joshua tree to be the focal point of my shot and took my first look up at the sky. If you’ve never been at a bortle 2 or higher location on a new moon, I’m not sure how to describe it better than to say it’s a sight to behold. It catches me off guard how special it is to see the milky way arching across the sky above me. As an aside, I’m starting to realize that I love just being out in a quiet dark sky spot, and the photos that come with it are almost secondary. Almost. The whole process is very …I dont know, serene? Emotional? Humbling? One or all of those.

Image one of the night on the Sigma 16mm, ISO 800, f/2.5. Only about 1 minute of exposure time, due to my intervalometer acting up and only taking one shot before going on a 99 hour countdown. Not sure why that happened. Should have gotten at least 4 minutes of total exposure time on the sky to really get a good product. Also the foreground light painting could have been smoother, but that was my first time really trying that, so I’ll give me a break there.

I have a love/apathetic relationship with my fisheye lens. I busted it out again here and I cant tell if I like this shot or not. Again, not crazy long exposure time because I must have been having an aneurysm, only about 1 minute total integration time, mostly due to my intervalometer being on the fritz. Probably should have found a way to make that work better in the moment.

After shooting this spot for a little over an hour, I packed up and moved on down the road to my last spot of the night and here’s where my compositions really went to garbage. I set up on the road a little further down and only got one shot off before a crew of cars started coming and I had to move the star tracker off the road. Here’s that one shot:

You can see the foreground is polluted by a headlight of a car strolling through on the main road and the core of the milky way was washed out by the lights of Palm Springs in the distance. I couldnt get a better foreground shot because the car was coming at me and I really didnt want to get run over in the middle of the night like that. Talk about a bummer. I wouldnt mind redoing this composition next time I’m out there.

I tried shooting a little more with the 16mm but I was realizing that the composition I had was kind of covered by the dirt pile on the side of the road and it just looked silly. So I called it a night of exploring and ventured over to my campsite, hoping desperately that nobody had swooped in due to me not arriving there until 330am. Luckily enough, the site was still mine when I got there, so I set up camp in the truck bed, set up the star tracker and aligned one more time to fire off a couple deep space shots. I’ve never attempted these kinds of shots before so I really was taking a literal shot in the dark here, and within a couple minutes of zooming in and out and aiming with my laser to an area the galaxy might be, I came across the Andromeda Galaxy.

Now, I’m what some people call an “emotional person”, so this shouldnt be a surprise, but I was overwhelmed with joy when I got the first frame full of this galaxy. I dont know what it was, maybe because I realized that I was actually capable of shooting it, maybe it was because I had a night behind me and the exhaustion of that came with heightened emotions, maybe I’m just a big baby that cries when he sees beautiful things. Probably all of the above. But regardless, my intervalometer decided to play nice and allowed me to get five 30 second exposures so I could at least have something to play around with when I reached the editing floor, and this is what I came out with:

Is it the best Andromeda Galaxy shot I’ve ever seen? Oh no, so far from that. Are the stars perfectly tracked with no trailing? Again, nope; it was almost 4am and I was tired. But I took that image. It’s my shot. I can do deep space imaging, at least on the base level. There’s so much more out there in the sky than what we can see and my camera gave me a glimpse of that, and I think that’s what gets me so emotional when I look at this shot.

More deep space photos in my future, and of course more landscape milky way shots as well. Next month is a big meteor shower that I’ll be in J Tree for with my friends, I’m ecstatic to show you what I come up with.

Clear skies, my friends.