08/09/2026
I took my kids camping this weekend in the Umatilla National Forest at the Clearwater Lookout Cabin (a retired fire lookout rented out and managed by the USFS) and set the camera up for some star trails. The photo represents about 3 hours' worth of time. I set the camera up to capture for 7 hours, but when I woke up and started going through the images, I had to discard about 4 hours' worth of images because of clouds and smoke.
The orange in the bottom left corner is from a wildfire. I knew from the Watch Duty app that there was a fire in that general direction, but it was at least 30 or 40 miles away (as the bird flies), so I was surprised to be able to see it, to be honest.
In the secondary photos I'm sharing of the fires, there are clearly two fires on the horizon, one of them never showed up in the Watch Duty app, so I wasn't sure which fires I was even looking at, or if there were fires closer to us than we realized. For the close-up shot, I zoomed in on the left-hand fire and, in the dark, with my naked eyes, I struggled to locate the right-hand fire.
I also got a Milky Way photo that I'm not super happy with because of how muted the stars are from the smoke that was layering the sky at that time. But I'll share it anyway.
