July 17, 2019
So where did I leave y'all in the last installment? Ah yes, by Arch Rock out in Joshua Tree. Well after I shot my Milky Way Pics I did a bit of light pinting to the loud chorus of Light! by the cockroachs, eh I mean photographers on the ledge. So I re-setup down by some rocks below the arch, which was fine until the guys screeming Light! a few minutes earlier started down though my shot with bright headlamps. After they left, myself and my collegue repositioned ourselves a bit further back, while the new folk up on the ledge crawled to the lower part of the arch to do light painting, ugh. We headed back to the Ryan Mountain Trailhead and noticed some nice rocks along sice of the road near Jumbo Rocks Campground. After getting a shot there, it was on to the parking by the trailhead to get my car for one more location that I had in mind. We ended up stopping a bit short of the location I had planned and finished our shots at Intersection Rock.
Milky Way over Intersection Rock.
We ended up at Intersection Rock which is a large rock that sits at the intersection of Park Blvd(it runs from 29 Palms to Joshua Tree) and the road to Barker Dam where I shot last month. When we look at the Milky Way, we only see the edges of the galactic core. The center of the galaxy is obscured at least for visible light by a dust lane that called the great rift. Above the great rift(or below in the Southern Hemisphere) is a dark nebula known as the Dark Horse Nebula(you have to look at it sideways. This nebula system has parts know as the Pipe Nebula(the back legs) and the Snake Nebula(front legs and the head) which is by Jupiter in this picture. Again 40 shots @ 15 seconds with light painting on the additional foreground shot augmented by car headlights from Park Blvd.
