The Traveling Widower

Tag: Astro-photography

  • Sleepless in Moab

    A man resting his head on a laptop at a desk in a hotel room, with a bed in the background and a water bottle on the table.

    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.

    A starry night sky illuminates a rugged rock formation in the foreground, creating a dramatic contrast against the countless stars above.

    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

  • Night Photography Adventure at Wrights Lake

    The Milky Way, from Wrights Lake, CA

    It seems like my short trips come in clusters. I got back from my Moss Landing excursion on Tuesday, and here I am, posting about another day (evening actually) trip on Thursday. Anything to stay busy I guess.

    I had signed up for a photography club outing for the 23rd, a nighttime photo shoot of the Milky Way, up in the Sierra. I have never done any serious night time photography – I have tried photographing  a full moon a few times but never seem to get the settings right. I figured with a new camera, and tons of YouTube videos on star photography to browse through, I might want to give it a try again.

    The location the trip organizer had selected was Wrights Lake, which is up a ways in the Sierra, at about 7K elevation. It is only a 90 minute drive from my house, mostly on highway (US-50 on the way to Lake Tahoe), with an 8 mile stretch on a paved mountain road. Narrow, winding, mountain road. There is a state campground along one end of the lake, with private cabins and property around the rest of it. There are a couple of other lakes near it and some nice hiking trails – great place to visit one of these days.

    The night that the organizer selected was a new moon, perfect for a dark sky, and also around the peak time for seeing the center of the Milky Way. But on Thursday, the weather forecast seemed to indicate that there would be a cloud cover on Saturday. Grrrr. Well, I had nothing better to do that evening (I rarely do), so I decided to go it alone. I got my camera gear together, read up on camera settings for my new Sony 7 IV, tossed the GoPro in the bag for the fun of it, and headed off to parts unknown. I did remember to put some warmer clothing in and a couple of blankets. It does get a a bir nippy at night.

    I set off at about 5PM, planning to get there with plenty of time to find a good place to setup for the evening. The trip organizer had never been there either, so I was really winging it. All I knew about the area was what I could see on Google satellite maps or on the state parks Website. The ride up US 50 was uneventful – I had been hiking in that area a few years ago and was familiar with the twists and turns. The turnoff on to the Wrights Lake Road is where the fun begins. The road is well maintained and paved all the way, but is narrow with a lot of hairpin turns. Not a big deal in daylight, but I knew that heading back down at 1AM will be a lot of fun. After a relatively quick ride, I turned into the Wrights Lake campground, which is quite large, and drove around looking for a good place to set up my gear. I wanted a spot that looked out over the lake – adds to the overall composition. The Milky Way stretches SE to NW, so ideally a spot on the NW corner of the lake would be best. Unfortunately, that is all private property reached by a rough dirt road. Not something I wanted to drive on late at night. There were some trails heading off to other lakes, but I was not interested in hiking either, especially in the dark. So I settled in near the small jetty they use to launch kayaks and canoes. Overnight parking was not permitted, but I was not planning on sleeping overnight in my car.

    The view from the little jetty was impressive – it is a beautiful, serene setting with low granite peaks to the North, surrounded by a thick pine forest. 

    Wrights Lake, CA
    The jetty
    Wrights Lake, CA
    A serene lake surrounded by tall pine trees, reflecting the blue sky and tree silhouettes on the water's surface.
    Photo of Wright Lake in california at sunset
    Sunset

    So now it was about 7:00PM, not even that close to sunset, and many hours before it was really dark enough to see the stars. Crap – I should have brought a book and a camp chair. And more to eat. Bad planning.

    Talk about being bored…I played with the cameras for a while, took some sunset photos from the jetty, and dozed in the car, listened to the radio. And looked at my watch every 3 minutes. Boring. 

    Finally around 9:30, I looked up through the moon roof and there they were….stars! It was pitch black out there, so I drove the car over to the loading area by the jetty, and carefully carried my gear out to the end. I was not alone – a couple or two were heading there to star gaze as well. They owned a cabin on the lake – I should have gotten to know them.

    And now for a brief interlude of photographic techno babble. Photographing stars can be a challenge for non-experts like myself. First of all, it’s really dark, especially in designated dark sky locations. This was not a designated site, but I could not see anything in front of me without my headlight. For cameras, that means you need 1) a fast lens, meaning it can open up to let a lot of light in 2)a camera that can adjust the ISO to a relatively high number. You lose quality (graininess), but gain light sensitivity for an image. But even then, you are going to be shooting at VERY slow shutter speeds – 8 to 20 seconds. 3)So a good, sturdy tripod is a must. And setting a few second delay on the shutter is a good idea too. And (there’s always one more), cameras have a hard time focusing on stars. They are really far away. So it’s best to do manual focusing as well.  And one more thing to watch for….airplanes and satellites. With a slow speed, you will get streaks across the image. Meteorites are fun though – a bright one flashed across the sky while I was setting up.

    OK, enough on the technical side. I had all of the above. I also brought my GoPro camera along to shoot some video, but it was too dark to fumble around with it. I was afraid I might drop in the lake. I carefully wandered down the jetty to the end, where there was a nice tree stump to sit on, got the camera set up on the tripod (no easy task in the dark), and spent about 2 hours snapping away, pointing at different spots above and around the lake. I was hoping the Milky Way would get brighter as the night moved along, but there were no discernible changes after 2 hours, and I was cold and tired. Time to head home. 

    The ride down to US-50 was a little scary, but not too bad – I just drove slow and carefully, especially around the curves. I made it home by 1:30AM. Not too bad. Now I have a ton of photos to work on with Photoshop – that will keep me busy for a while. And are a few that I have started working on which desperately need some editing.

    Finally, hard to believe, but I may be going back again this weekend with the club group. I’d like to try a few different things, like a lower ISO so the images will be sharper. And I’ll bring a chair and food this time.

    And if you are interested in visiting this place:
    https://www.recreation.gov/camping/campgrounds/231954