An Evening Under the Stars

When we went for our evening meal it wasn't all that dark but afterwards, when we looked up on our way back to our rooms, the sky was inky black and the stars shined so brightly. The Milky Way was incredibly clear in the night sky right above our heads, and the constellation of Scorpio shone bright and clear.

We retraced our steps back to the gate that led to the quiver trees, negotiated the rocky floor and looked for a suitable location for our nightscape photos. It was extremely dark, so dark, in fact, the camera screen showed nothing of the scene, so it was somewhat tricky to align the composition correctly but after a while I got used to the extreme dark and felt my way towards what I wanted.

The location was fabulous. The quiver trees were great foregrounds to the night sky, though I'm not suggesting it was easy to find something uncluttered. An annoyance was the lights from other people. We all needed to light our way at times, but there were people with exceptionally bright torches that often ruined my photos, meaning there were times of waiting for them to move or turn off their lights, or just taking the photo again. Occasionally, their lights were helpful, though not often. The main photo from my camera has the trees lit from their lights and not mine.

I have taken photos to create a Milky Way panorama which I hope works when I process it. Hope so. Overall though, it was a fabulous evening and, as I have said, the sky was unbelievably good and there was something I had never experienced - ss the evening wore on, the Milky Way became lower in the sky. In fact, by 11:30 p.m. it was too low to work well for photos. But as it got lower in the sky, our surroundings became even darker, and we became aware of just how much the stars provided additional light. It was amazing to experience.Read more