My Most Popular Image Was Also My Most Difficult

Milky Way panorama arching over The Fins rock formation in Arches National Park, Utah. Stunning desert night sky astrophotography showcasing the galaxy above iconic sandstone fins.

Unlike my first two blogs, I didn’t have to go to the ends of the earth to capture this image. Getting to Southern Utah is a LOT easier than either Patagonia or Northern Alaska. Almost 40 years ago when my wife was pregnant with our first child, we visited Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon in Southwestern Utah, and then we visited Monument Valley in Southeastern Utah, and that was my total previous experience with Southern Utah. There are 5 national parks across Southern Utah. They’re known as the Mighty 5. And 3 of them were still on my bucket list. On this trip I crossed the remaining 3 off the list. Capitol Reef, Arches and Canyonlands. They are each dramatic in their own way.

For this shot I left my hotel in Moab at about 2:30 AM. Yes, it’s difficult to get up and out. There is a small silver lining though. No one is staffing the entry booth at the park so no fees, no timed entry reservations.

The ideal time of the month to shoot the Milky Way is during the new moon and the roughly 1 week before and after it. The Milky Way is very dim. If the moon is anything more than a sliver it just creates too much light to effectively shoot the Milky Way. The ideal time of year to shoot the Milky Way arch is in the spring when the Milky Way appears low enough to the horizon in a nearly horizontal plane from our perspective. That gets it close enough to the horizon to shoot the whole arch and get some foreground in.

On top of all of this you need to be situated in a very dark place - Arches is an International Dark Sky Park - with no clouds in the sky. And though Arches is in the desert, that doesn’t mean it’s always cloudless. One previous trip I made to the Southwest desert resulted in days of overcast skies. No rain and no Milky Way photos.

But this trip was a lot luckier. The skies were cloudless at just the right time.

All of this, and more, went into the planning for this shot. I had some help from various websites and phone apps to get everything lined up, including how the Milky Way would line up with my chosen foreground.

All of this planning resulted in me standing in the chilly dark at 3 AM in Arches National Park in late April wearing warm clothes and a headlamp setting my camera up on a star tracker mounted on a tripod. The planning for this shot took months. Sometimes it’s all for naught because you can’t predict weather very far in advance. But this time it had all worked out. I had all the necessary gear, I was in the right spot. Now what?

The Milky Way is very dim. To shoot it requires special techniques, plural, and special gear. I mentioned the star tracker above. The earth moves and so, relative to me, the Milky Way would be moving the sky relatively quickly. To get a clear shot of the Milky Way requires a long exposure. But if the camera, or the subject, move during a long exposure, the result is blurry. Even a 10 second exposure of the Milky Way can slightly blur the stars. To get a really sharp image you need the camera to move in sync with the stars. That’s what a star tracker can do for you. For this image I took multiple shots of 90 seconds each.

If that sounds like a long time, when you’re standing alone in the dark, it is. And I didn’t take just one picture. The Milky Way stretches from horizon to horizon. It’s possible to use an extremely wide angle lens to get it all in one shot, but with that comes a great deal of crazy distortion. For this shot I took 6 side by side shots which I later merged using special software for the purpose to create the panorama of the Milky Way arch. But that’s only half of the photo!

Next I took the foreground photos. Arriving at my spot at roughly 3 AM, between set up, test shots to get everything in focus and my exposure levels where I want them and to make sure that my stars are perfectly sharp, and then taking six 90 second photos all took about an hour to an hour and a half. A little while later the very first rays of the pre dawn started to give a slight bit of light to my foreground. On a new moon night in an International Dark Sky Park, there’s no other option. The ground was so dark I couldn’t see my shoes without a flashlight. But between 4:30 and 5 AM there was just enough of an inkling of light that I could now take the foreground photo.

To take that photo I had to remove the star tracker because for the foreground I don’t want the camera to move. That’s another reason that separate pictures have to be taken of the sky and the foreground. So at roughly 4:45AM I took another 6 pictures, this time of the rocks and the foreground. And then I packed my gear and headed back to the hotel and surprisingly, I was able to fall asleep!

Next came the editing, also known as post processing. For this photo that was quite involved. I had a total of a dozen photographs that had to be stitched together, then their colors and exposure levels teased to make them look like you see here, and then finally joined together into the complete image in front of you. It took a lot more time doing it than to describe it. Rough total time was 90 minutes.

So these then are the 3 stages of taking an image. The planning stage, which can be anything between something catching your eye in the moment to planning months in advance like with this photo. Taking the picture which might take only a moment or in this case, a couple of hours. And then post processing. The last phase for the first roughly 2 centuries of photography was somewhat industrial, done in a dark room which chemical wizardry. Terms we still use today originated in that time.

Today it’s done with computers which is at once far easier and because of that, far more capable. Cameras have advanced dramatically but with all their advancements they are still not much more than half as capable as your eye. And so rendering exactly what you saw, in most cases, requires some computer work after the fact. But each stage is a combination of technology and art. Each stage is an opportunity to express the unique vision of your eyes, brain and emotions.