A winter storm brought snow, clouds, and fog to some of my favorite photographic locations. The early morning sun lights up a band of clouds that encircles the San Francisco Peak. Below the peaks, fog lies in the low areas of both Upper and Lower Lake Mary.
A smaller area of fog sits in the corner of the Mormon Lake basin and partially obscures some of the old ranch buildings.
Finally, a small patch of grass pokes up from the still water of Lake Mary while fog blurs the background.
National Parks, that is. Here are several photographs taken this winter in the National Parks and Monuments that are in northern Arizona.
These two images were taken shortly after sunrise at Wukoki Pueblo in Wupatki National Monument. A recent snowstorm had brought snow to lower elevations and I was hoping there would be some snow at this location. No snow but the sunrise was still pretty nice.
Later that morning in Sunset Crater National Monument, where there was new snow, a small amount of snow on the namesake crater helping to reveal its subtle textures.
The next two images are from Grand Canyon National Park at sunrise. A recent minor storm had left some low clouds and fog in the lowest reaches of the canyon. As the sun rose higher and the canyon walls warmed the fog was lifted up and out of the canyon producing some eye-level clouds for a brief moment.
Finally, we have a panorama of the rising nearly-full Moon in late afternoon. Wonderful!
In late January, the easily visible planet Venus was located in the same part of the evening sky as the dimmer and distant planet Neptune. I’ve never tried to photograph Neptune but this pairing of the planets was a good reason to do so.
The first attempt was taken on the evening of 27 January (shown below) and I was limited to very short exposures as I was using a standard tripod. The second attempt was the following night from a better location and, more importantly, I was using my equatorial mount star tracker so that I could follow the stars (or planets) for longer exposures.
The image at the top is the second attempt. High, thin cirrus clouds were beginning to move in from the west and I was hoping that the clouds might make some of the stars more colorful. What I got was an amazing corona surrounding the very bright planet Venus while stars and the dimmer Neptune appeared relatively unchanged.
The image above is from the first night of shooting and shows diffraction spikes around Venus. Examing these two images you can easily see how far Venus has moved in one night by comparing the position of Phi Aquarii.
I’m still testing out the new-to-me Nikon 180mm f/2.8 ED AI-S manual focus lens. Weather has been the limiting factor but I did get a chance to shoot for a few nights.
Satellite imagery suggested that I might get about an hour of clear skies a few nights ago so I found myself at Sunset Crater National Monument—a Dark Sky National Park. The clouds moved in a bit faster than expected so I only got a few exposures before thin clouds moved across my target in the sky—Andromeda Galaxy (M31). The thin clouds resulted in slightly enhanced color in the vicinity of the brighter stars. Art vs. accuracy. Hmmm… In this case, I like the art version.
The previous night I had also attempted this shot but the lens would not maintain sharp focus. It turns out that when pointed up at an extreme angle the focus ring slips. I remembered reading about this and a quick search online brought me to this article on the Cloudy Nights website.
It turns out there is a cheap solution (free) and an elegant ($$$) solution. I tried the cheap version and it works but I’m intrigued by the other solution as well.
Above is another version of M31 taken about 10 days earlier when the object was lower in the sky and the lens did not have slippage issues. This is a single 2-minute exposure that has been histogram stretched using rnc-color-stretch.
Finally, I tried shooting the Orion Nebula (M42) recently but the shot was “photo-bombed” by the SpaceX Starlink cluster.
This is going to be happening more as SpaceX and other companies launch tens of thousands of these small satellites into Low Earth Orbit over the next few years.
Over the past couple of years I have tried to get good photographs of the Moon rising over the San Francisco Peaks. A good time of year for this is January when the nearly full Moon rises in the northeast. Then find a place along old Route 66 in Brannigan Park and get your shot. It works best if there is fresh snow on the peaks but sometimes you just have to take what you get.
And here are some images from 2015 which was the first time I tried shooting from this location.
Sometimes the first photograph you take of a place is the best. I’ll keep trying.