03/21/2024
🌌 Great Sand Dunes Milky Way
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This picture has been on my list for a while to capture. While you could view the milky way as the subject, and many times it is the subject, that is not usually my goal when taking pictures at night, instead my goal is to capture the landscape at night with the milky way and the stars as the background. What is even better, in my opinion, is when you have a very stark and barren landscape that differs from the surrounding landscape, and what better of a description of the Great Sand Dunes then that.
You can backpack in the backcountry of the Sand Dunes which is any part of the Sand Dunes behind the High Dune. You just need a backcountry permit, which in March is not an issue, as unsurprisingly it is very cold in March. If you have ever been to the Great Sand Dunes National Park and have climbed them (or any other sand dunes), then you know it is not an easy hike. Each step going half the distance you hoped you would cover and the seemingly straightforward hike turning into following ridges to not increase your climb later. Knowing this my friend Chandler and I strapped on our backpacks and started hiking a couple hours before sunset. By the time we made it to High Dune the sun was setting and we continued to scout out a good camping spot, by nightfall we had started setting up camp (which you can see in the middle of the photo). We ate dinner and started looking for some places to take pictures later in the night.
Great Sand Dunes National Park is considered a national dark park meaning it is especially dark and is kept that way, this park is one of the darkest spots in Colorado which means a spectacular view of the stars. This night was forecasted to be completely clear and during a new moon. Early in the night there were lots of constellations to look at, the winter milky way arch (spring arch was not going to rise until early morning) and also a lot of shooting stars, including the longest one I've ever witnessed.
Between looking at the starts and looking at possible photo spots we did try to get some sleep, at least what we could manage in the cold. The forecast for this night was a low of 18 which tested our limits. Early in the morning while setting up for some pictures my toes started to become even more numb than they normally were and I quickly ran back to the tent to realize that I was probably in the early stages of frostbite. You definitely need to keep moving or keep warm if you want to last the night. After warming up some, I would walk as I waited for my camera to keep blood flow to my feet. Not only did the cold test our limits, it also tested the limits of our cameras. I woke up to a completely frosted over camera, batteries were drained far faster than you would think and our cameras would lock up every now and again. As a result of quickly dying batteries, my main star tracker died leading to a lot of rushing to get a second star tracker set up, aligned and working. This panorama is made up of 16 frames. 10 tracked frames for the sky and 6 stationary frames for the foreground and each was a 2 minute exposure. That exposure time is only doable with the star tracker as the earth will move too much and cause the stars to streak in the sky. With the star tracker you align with earth’s axis using the north star in the northern hemisphere, the tracker then rotates clockwise to counteract the counter-wise rotation of the earth. Once I had the 10 pictures of the sky, I took 6 more frames of the foreground without the tracker to get a sharp foreground. Stacking the photos and doing some editing was all that was left.
Throughout our struggles in the cold I did somehow get the picture I came there for, the one you are looking at right now. The photo captures the sweeping dunes of the Great Sand Dunes, the Sangre de Cristo mountains and the spring Milky Way arch with the core on the right. The Milky Way core will continue to rise this spring and summer until it sets in late October.
📍: Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado
📷: Sony A7RIII w/ Zeiss Batis 18mm ~ MSM Star Tracker ~ Manfrotto Befree tripod
⚙ : Foreground: 2min. 18mm f/5.6 ISO 3200 / Background: 2min. 18mm f/2.8 ISO 1000 / 16 frame panorama
