Star Party Edition!

I'm celebrating the night sky & giving away poetry!

Greetings Friends,

July is my birth month and also the first time I’ve been able to photograph the Milky Way this year – though not for lack of trying. My husband and I were clouded out during the new moon at Fort Worden State Park in March and Dosewallips State Park in Brinnon in April.

The past two weekends Kevin and I camped in scenic Washington locales on clear starry nights in dark sky locations on nights and watched wonders unfold in the firmament. While there, I tried out techniques to improve the detail and clarity of the my photos with the equipment I have, and in the ensuing days at home spent many happy hours in “post-processing” to create the images below. I hope you enjoy them!

And to keep the creative birthday celebration going, I’m giving away my two most recent books of poetry in Kindle format from July 16 through 20th. Details below.

Here’s hoping you’re staying cool, at least after dark!

Warmly,

Cathy

****

Star Party July 5-7

On the first weekend of July coinciding with the new moon (meaning no moon while photographing at night) my intrepid husband drove us and our travel trailer to the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, a roundtrip of about 550 miles) during a heatwave when daytime temperatures soared to 103. We spent our first night at Skamania County’s Home Valley Campground, without electricity. Thankfully Kevin bought Ryobi battery-operated fans to cool us just for the trip. With the windows and doors open and the help of sleeping pills we managed a reasonable night’s sleep after an easy time image gathering. The park had a small but sweet view across the gorge with the Milky Way’s Dark Horse Nebula rising just above the mountains in Oregon, and our foreground was lit by two street lights at the park’s ball field. We brought our lawn chairs, settled in, and let my camera’s intervalometer snap the shutter repeatedly for an hour or so while we chatted and listened to trains traveling on both sides of the river.

A single image, this is the Milky Way from Home Valley Campground. The red-orange streak at the top of the frame is a fireball (shooting star, or meteor) that we saw with the naked eye. The blue and white streaks in the image are satellites. Our night sky is so full of manmade objects, it’s surprising to find an image without a plane or satellite!

A vertical panorama of several images stitched together showing the entire view of the Milky Way from the clearing at Home Valley Park. Trees on edges of the frame are lit by street lights.

We camped at Maryhill State Park in Goldendale on our second night, arriving mid-afternoon to a site with electricity and water, yahoo! And not a speck of shade. We blasted our a/c and brought the trailer temp down from 90 into the high 70s while we napped (passed out from heat is more accurate) inside our trailer until evening. At twilight we ventured to nearby Stonehenge Memorial, a replica of Stonehenge in England, completed in 1929 as a memorial to those from Klickitat County who died fighting in World War One. We shared our time there with several other visitors who stayed only a few minutes. The first, a family, explored the monument by flashlight while my camera was take a series of 15 photos. The light ruined the foreground of all those photos, except one, from which I was able to create an enjoyable image.

Maryhill Stonehenge with humans — if you look at the brightest opening in the monument you’ll see the silhouettes of two small figures. There was lovely air glow in the sky, as well as lights from a small community across the Gorge. The sky is a stack of the 15 15-second exposures I took as the family explored, while the foreground is the single usable image with their flashlight. This is my first blended image, using one of the few functions in Photoshop I know called “replace sky.”

The night sky with a meteor traveling through the Milky Way taken from inside the monument. My husband turned on my lumicube panel mini for a two seconds to cast interior lighting. A single image with software to remove camera noise from the high ISO in low light.

A seven image panorama including the solstice stone on the far left, the view across the gorge, and Mt. Hood (the triangular shadow) on the horizon on the right.

In case you wondered, I do take photos when it’s light out.

Beauty along the Columbia River Gorge and Clear Creek Falls in the Wenatchee National Forest

Star Party July 13-14

This past Saturday we set out for Mt Saint Helens by way of the small town of Toledo, in WA 505 which began as a community of dairy farms, and saw hundreds and hundreds of people heading home after a parade and pancake breakfast celebrating the 105th year of Cheese Days while waiting at the town’s one stop sign. It was almost as fun as seeing the parade itself.

We camped at Kid Valley campground on Spirit Lake Highway, a small private camp with a path directly from our site through the woods to the only restaurant in the area where we enjoyed great burgers and lunch cocktails with locally grown black- and huckle- berries.

Later Kevin drove 25 miles to the Castle Lake lookout with stunning views of the volcano. We arrived well before sunset, occupying ourselves for h-o-u-r-s until the stars finally came out. The moon was half-full and out the entire time I was making images. This meant I didn’t get as much detail or color in the sky, but all that light made for bright distinct foregrounds, and I was able to make my first blends with different exposures — a common practice for photographers — where I combined two images, each taken from the exact same tripod location, exposing one for optimal sky, the other for optimal foreground. I also had such a wide open view that I photographed a horizontal panorama of the entire Milky Way arch. The top of the arch is cut off since I don’t know how to compose or edit multiple rows of both horizontal and vertical images (perhaps I’ll yet learn), but I’m still happy with the results.

Earlier in the year, the Milky Way appears as if it is rising out of the crater. In mid July I was fortunate to have the Dark Horse Nebula in the same frame as the volcano with my 24 mm lens. This is a blended image. The sky portion is 10 identical exposures stacked together and averaged to remove satellites and planes. The foreground is a single image.

This is my second blended image of the evening taken about 20 feet from the blend above later in the night when the moon had moved and was lighting the foreground differently. I like the addition of the grasses, even though they’re blurry from a breeze during the two minute exposure. The sky is 10 15-second images stacked.

Milky Way arch panorama from end to end. The foreground includes the path at the overlook, where I was joined by two photographers, one just after twilight, and one just before I left. We exchanged a few pleasantries, but mostly worked in companionable silence, mindful not to move or shine lights that would impact the other’s photos.

And a few daytime photos.

Driving Spirit Lake Hwy to Mt St Helens

Poetry Party July 16 - 20

I’m celebrating my birthday month by giving away my two most recent books of poetry: “Difficult Gifts” and “Home by Another Road” at no cost in the Kindle edition for the next 5 days. (Click on the book title to order). You do not need a Kindle device to download the book. You can read it via the Kindle app on a tablet or phone, and using the Kindle cloud reader on a computer. If you know someone I don’t who would enjoy the gift of poetry, please share the link (or this newsletter) with them.