Photographing Forbidden Skies

at night, with permission, of course

Panorama of the Palouse Falls and Snake River just before sunset

Dear Ones,

I’ve been consumed with family life since mid-May, and am just taking a moment (a few hours actually) to share an update and a bit of photography with you before I submerge into necessary details again.

My stepdad died the morning of June 20th, just hours before my husband and I set out for a night of Milky Way photography at Palouse Falls in Central Washington. Palouse Falls, Washington state’s official waterfall, is located inside a day use only state park that grants special permission to one group (up to 8 people) of amateur photographers one night each week. I’d made campground reservations nearby months earlier, thinking we’d only get to see the falls in daylight, until another photographer shared an image from the park in my Milky Way Photography Facebook group just a few weeks earlier, and kindly provided me with info to make a request, which was granted!

It felt like a rare opportunity, but after I heard the news of his death, I thought perhaps I should fly back to California, where I’d spent the past month after Jerry broke his hip in two places. When I arrived in California a week after the fall, he’d been moved from hospital to skilled nursing care with no hope of walking again (which had been only possible with a walker and my mom’s help after a stroke 2.5 years ago), or of returning home. It was an all-consuming month of helping my mom prepare to live without him at their house in the mountains (which she designed, and they built) while witnessing his steady decline.

A few nights after my arrival, craving some “star therapy” I ventured down their dirt road after midnight toward a small horse farm with a clearing between towering pines where I’d be able to get part of the Milky Way core in frame. A pair of glowing yellow eyes illuminated by my headlamp stopped me in my tracks. They were quite a few yards downhill, and I couldn’t tell how far off the ground those eyes were. It could’ve been coyote, bobcat, fox, cougar, or bear. (There’s a fox who visits the property frequently, so I’m telling myself it was her.) I very slowly walked backwards the way I had come and the eyes didn’t veer off road and into the trees as I’d hoped, but came slowly and steadily toward me until they simply disappeared. I was a wreck by the time I got back into the house, where I stayed put every night after dark, looking at the brilliant stars overhead from the safety of the bedroom window, still craving the wonder of standing beneath them.

Dark star filled skies at my parents’ home August 2023

My mom encouraged me to keep my plans, saying there was nothing that needed to be done right then. And it seemed fitting to drive to dark skies, to stand before basalt cliffs made by molten lava millions of years ago and a roaring waterfall carved by the flooding of Lake Missoula in an ice age 12-15,000 years ago. Nearly 30 years ago when Jerry and mom were slowly building the house and staying in their RV on weekends, my husband and I would visit with our two daughters, and we’d all lay down on blankets in the dark gazing up at the dark skies searching for satellites back when they were rarities. Stretched out alongside one another under innumerable stars, we felt our rightful insignificance in the grand scheme of the universe. In the weeks before Jerry’s death, we spoke of those nights, memories he took to the end.

Getting to the falls wasn’t easy. A drive that should’ve been 5 hours took 8. The KOA campground’s layout made maneuvering our trailer very tricky. And the skies were cloudy all day, and into twilight, leaving me doubtful that I’d be able to photograph anything other than clouds.

Driving through the rolling hills of the Palouse Region

Since there were only two of us, a second group of 6 was allowed to photograph that night. They took a higher view of the plateau and falls, following a trail the ranger warned us was home to rattlesnakes, and which I immediately ruled out. I just saw an image from that location this morning, and it turns out to be better for including the width of the Milky Way, and the depth of waterfall canyon without interference of the guardrails and fencing that I had to work around.

The images I have made here involved taking the foreground photos at blue hour so that the waterfall and cliffs were in enough light to be visible. Later after dark, when the Milky Way core was visible, I took more photos for the sky, taken in the same location and tripod position. Using Photoshop I then combined the foreground and sky photos to create a single image. This technique, called a blend is extremely common, and most photographers use more precise methods (layer masks) than the “replace sky” feature I used to create their images. I haven’t had time to learn proper methods yet, but I’m happy with the images, given the challenging conditions of photographing a deep dark canyon full of foreground interest, and combining it with the Milky Way reaching higher into the sky than my lens could capture.

In the images below, the sky is a panorama of 3 photos, rather than a single photo, which I needed to place the Milky Way core in proper position over the area I photographed during blue hour. Unfortunately, there’s a dark vertical line where the frames combine. I’m hopeful that someday I’ll learn how to avoid or eliminate those.

In less than two weeks, I’m heading back to California again, to help my mom downsize and sell her home, and to move her in with my husband and me, a process which is going to take a few months. It’ll be a while until I send out another communique.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a few recent images from home.

Wishing you all well,

~ Cathy