Sleepless in Moab

April 19th, 2026

I’m beginning to feel like I’m back working in one of the IT jobs early in my career where I was on-call for software issues 24X7, and something went wrong every night. I remember one time where my wife found me at 2AM, sleeping on the floor with the phone in my hand and someone calling out “Rich, are you still there?” This was the fifth straight night of star photography in the park. On Saturday I was in a daze most of the day, until I had a nice 2 hour nap before we headed out at 11:30PM. That turned into something of a wash – cloud cover, and competition for a prime location, but I did get some nice milky way and start shots. We did not get back to the hotel until 5AM though. I managed to sleep until 10:30 on Sunday, and lazed around a bit. I missed the hotel breakfast, and the one or two restaurants that have all day breakfast were packed. I wound up with a cup of coffee at the hotel, and went out later for a real power lunch – some pretty good gelato with a good cup of coffee. 

I spent most of Sunday just working through photos, and then had another Lightroom and software presentation from our trip lead. I had a hard time keeping my eyes open (not due to boredom….it was a great session). Since everyone else is checking out and heading home on Monday, our plans for Sunday evening were to have a relatively short Milky Way session at midnight and be back by 3AM. That would be an almost normal evening. But not much. 

Once again, the clouds did us in. We set up our gear in a parking lot, hoping to get the full Milky Way arch on the horizon. Unfortunately, there were low clouds that just did not want to move, so our smaller group just hung around, talking and trying different techniques until about 2AM. I played with different combinations of shutter speed and ISO – in order to print larger formats, you need to try and keep the star shapes closer to round, and in order to do that, you need a faster shutter speed. But you then have to compensate for the reduction in light with a higher ISO which increases noise. So, I tried various combinations which I can work with later on using Lightroom. I’m just getting up to speed with this application – it’s complicated and powerful, and a lot of editing needs to be done on the low-light photos. Here’s an example of one – the base RAW image just shows a starry sky, with the outline of the rock feature. There are a lot of steps involved to make the foreground visible. The workshop instructor gave us a few demonstrations, and also sent us a “cheat sheet” of the workflow he follows. Absolutely invaluable.

I takes a while for me to create just one of these. so I’ll wait until I get home and can use my big screen iMac for the processing, One funny thing about this image – camping is only allowed in one area in the park. But some guy decided to park his van along the road, right in front of this feature. it showed up perfectly clear when I finished process and immediately cropped it out. We probably kept him up until we finally left.

Like I said in a previous post, this was a technical workshop – I really did learn a lot about my camera, and how to use it in low-light scenarios. Time well spent.

It’s always hard when one of these trips comes to a close. You spend a lot of time with new acquaintances, and then everyone goes their separate ways and in most cases, you never hear from them again. I think from the seven trips I’ve been on in the past 2 years, I’ve heard back from maybe one person via comments on my blog. I have picked up a few new subscribers though. I don’t really like to advertise the blog – I only give out the URL if someone asks, so for this trip, I may have one or two new viewers. 

This trip is not over yet for me – I’ve got two more full days here before I drive back to Salt Lake City, and do not fly back home until Thursday. It will be weird being on my own, especially since I plan to go out one more time in search of the Milky Way tonight. So, more posts and hopefully more photos as well.

Peace