Milky Way in the Desert
The California Desert is a great location for Milky Way shots since it's dry and the high desert avoids surface air distortions. The rocks, hills, and cliffs as a foreground are hard to beat.
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The Milky Way with a meteor at Red Rock.
Mars peeks above the horizon while a meteor streaks towards the galactic center in the desert with a single car illuminating the distant highway. One of the things I decided to do, since I was not shooting alone was to not use the sky tracker. Instead I was shooting 8 shots and then using Photoshop to reduces noise with a a technique called stack averaging. The problem with this shot is that Mars was rising while I took the 8 shots and was not visible in the first few shots and got averaged out. I added it back in from the final shot, along with the meteor and the car headlights in the foreground. The foreground was shot while we still had some daylight and darkened.
