June 26, 2019

The first weekend of June was the new moon(actually it was on Monday) so it was time to go out and get some Milky Way shots. It was cloudy by the coast and there were thunder storms in the mountains so a photographer friend(the guy who organizes our Meetups) asked if I wanted to join him on a Milky Way shoot in Joshua Tree. I had wanted to shoot there since I shot there with the Meetup group 2 years ago. He said I should bring my girls(furbabies) along for the ride. Google said when we left that the journey would take 2 hours and 40 minutes. After a stop to gas up and some pit stops for the girls and myself, this turned into 3 and ½ hours. My fellow photographer and I got separated so I headed to where we shot in July of 2017 where there’s a rock that I call the ‘Fuck You’ rock. It’s got a bit of a portion sticking up like a middle finger. My minimum goal was to shoot 2 shots: a star trail looking north and a time lapse of the Milky Way rising over the hills to the east.

3 / 4

Milky Way Star Trail.

This star trail was a freebie. I had the series of shots from the Milky Way time lapse(360 shots at 25 seconds each with a 5 second gap), so why not do a star trail with those? I wasn’t able to use all of the 360 shots, some shots had bright headlights shining into the fisheye lens, so I was limited to about 280 shots. The headlights from the passing cars did manage to light up the foreground. The area with all the headlights at the left is the parking area for Barker Dam.