The majority of my images are captured in the light-raging Bortle 8-9 skies around the Southbay of Los Angeles County. But I had the rare opportunity to get out into Bortle 1-2 skies in the remote White Mountains of Arizona late this summer. Most people think about searing desert heat, Saguaro cactuses, and 115+ degree temperatures during the Arizona summer. But much like California, Arizona is an incredible pantheon of climates and physical geography. The White Mountains, near AZ's eastern border, are not unsimilar to much of the Sierra Nevada in California - high elevation alpine forests, unpredictable weather, thunderstorms in the summer, persistent snow in the winter, and beautiful high elevation plains in the summer - best taken in from the back of a horse.

This Milky Way image is from a guest ranch around 7600 feet nestled in one of the meadows, amongst one of those alpine forests. The faint glow in the windows of the cabin show the power of long exposure astrophotography - as its temporary residents sleep, the faint glow from their electronics fill the pixel's light collection wells to create a warm yellow highlight in the image. It's so wonderful to see the Milky Way so starkly in the night with just our eyeballs, and even more amazing to see once processed in a photo. The Milky Way core (the center of our galaxy, where the lies a massive black hole) is just behind the cabin and tree line. There are a few daylight photos below as well to show the beauty is not just at night, but 24/7.

For this image, I used a DSLR on a Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer tracking mount. The tracker rotates the camera to compensate for Earth’s rotation, allowing longer exposures before the stars stretch into trails. The lens is a Samyang F/2.4, 14mm wide angle lens. At the scale of a wide sky image, that motion might seem insignificant, but give it a minute and the camera will happily document the fact that we’re standing on a rotating planet. The final sky image combines fifteen one-minute exposures, for fifteen minutes of total integration. I also captured ten dark calibration frames, taken with the camera covered, to help correct hot pixels and repeatable thermal signal from the sensor. No flat (diffuse) calibration frames were used.