Since I got a little off with the order of posts let me set the stage for you. I had just finished eating Beau Jo’s Pizza in beautiful Evergreen, Colorado. I was full in both food and contentment. The only real goal I had when starting this coddiwompling adventure was to find a place to practice astrophotography.
My first trip to Red Rocks
Originally I expected I might go into the mountains and use them in the foreground for the stars, but I gave up on that idea when I started seeing how difficult it was to get tent space. Instead, I thought to use Red Rocks Amphitheater.
A nighttime concert
If you’ve never heard of Red Rocks, it is one of the most unique arenas in the world. Built directly into the geology of the stones, the open air theater seats over 9,000 people. The first concert I saw there was Lindsey Stirling and it was extremely memorable. It rained during the opening acts so my friend and I got soaked, but we dried enough after it stopped to not be cold. Then night fell, the stars came out, and we had a view of the city lights in the distance while enjoying a lovely evening listening to beautiful music.
All of this is to say that Red Rocks is pretty neat and distinct looking. There is even a hiking park around it. I ran into 3 problems though.
The road accessible view of the beautiful shape of the rocks doesn’t point towards the Milky Way (see images below).
The hiking trails were closed due to covid-19 so I could try to find a different angle.
It was starting to get cloudy.
The warning at the Chimney Rock Visitors Center
I’d only gotten 4 hours of sleep the night before and was getting tired, but I also knew I didn’t want to try for astrophotos the following night so I started looking for other subjects. My first thoughts went to Chimney Rock in the Nebraska Panhandle which Google Maps informed me was 3 hours 45 minutes away and the sky was predicted to be clear. However, there were no parking spots where I could shoot it against the Milky Way from my car (you have to look south to see it). I wasn’t about to go walking in a field with rattle snakes in the middle of the night.
Courthouse and Jail Rocks with a parking lot north
Then I saw a marker on the map for Courthouse Rock and Jail Rock near to Chimney Rock and to my astonishment, there was a parking area directly north of them. That was perfect! It was 9 p.m.. The Milky Way would be rising around 1 a.m. so I had just enough time to get there. The only question was, could I make it without falling asleep.
I’ve been known to get so tired while driving that I literally can’t keep my eyes open and have had to stop on the side of the road to sleep if a rest area or gas station wasn’t near. To give myself a fighting chance, instead of driving directly to Jail Rock, I navigated from rest area to rest area in case I had to give up and sleep. It’s a good thing I did because as I arrived at each rest area after an hour’s drive, I was getting tired and needed to get out and stretch. But I knew if I could make it, it would be one of the best night photo shoots of my life so far.
To keep going, I sang my lungs out to the Hamilton and Rent soundtracks. After 4 hours and 3 stops, I finally arrived. Now, I have to be honest. I was a bit hesitant driving up to the parking area. Google Maps said the site was technically closed due to Covid-19, but from what I could tell on the map, there was no gate leading up to the drive. I assumed they just meant the hiking paths. I also wasn’t sure if when I arrived, I’d drive up and stumble upon people already there. Basically I didn’t want to get into any kind of trouble.
As I pulled into the dark parking area I was momentarily shocked when I saw just how large the two rocks were. I knew they were big, but I wasn’t expecting them to be so close! I mean, I pulled up and boom, the giant Courthouse Rock filled my windshield.
Giant Courthouse Rock
Once I got my bearings and ascertained that I was completely alone, I got to work. I had 3 shots I wanted to get: a motion time lapse sweeping across the rocks and the galaxy, a long exposure, and a panorama. The time lapses take the longest so I started that first taking one 15 second exposure every 20 seconds for 3 hours which was all the time I had until the sun would start to lighten the sky.
Then I got my long exposures using a different camera which I stacked together to bring out more detail and reduce noise. Finally I did the panorama. For that I zoomed in and took a bunch of tight shots and stitched them together to create a super high resolution image.
So here’s the final stacked photo from the long exposures.
Jail Rock with the Milky Way Galaxy. This is the shot that made getting no sleep worth it.
This is a stack of 10 photos. 6 for the background. 4 for the foreground. I’ve since learned that I should have taken about 20 photos for the background which would have helped reduce the grain and noise in the image. I stacked them together on my Mac using Starry Sky Stacker.
Next is the panorama. I can’t upload the full sized image to my website, (which is the whole point of creating one; to see things at high magnification) but here’s a link to the 216 megapixel image. It suffers from only having 1 image of each section so it has a lot of grain in it as well, but it’s huge! The yellow box is the resolution of a 4k screen.
21 photos stitched together. Full size image here.
The 2 bright circles on the left are Jupiter (the bigger one) and Saturn. It can’t be seen, but Pluto is just to the right of Jupiter and Mars is just off screen to the left. I tried briefly to photograph the two planets and for the first time ever I captured the 4 galilean moons!
The 4 Moons Galileo first saw in 1609
Also, if I zoom in and tweak the settings, you can just barely make out the shape of Saturn’s rings. I could improve these if I got a light filter of some sort because they were very bright.
Saturn and its blurry rings
Finally, here is the motion time lapse. I tried using a more zoomed in lens than my last attempt at a star time lapse, but my aim was off and I lost track of the horizon. I was intending to pan across both Courthouse and Jail rock. Instead, it just looks like a static time lapse of the stars. You can’t even tell that the camera is moving aside from the very beginning. Oh well. As I always say, if you got everything right the first time, the world would be boring.
Later at home, I spent a few hours watching an app to see what flew by in my time lapse. If you’re wondering, most of the satellites in the video are Starlink internet satellites. They’ve upset a lot of astronomers because there are so many and they are very reflective. There are more going up all the time. At least one other moving object was a rocket body.
So with the sun coming up, I headed for home, excited to start editing all of these photos and videos. I had to stop on the way home and sleep for about 20 minutes at a gas station, but otherwise I made it to my journey’s end 5 hours later.
It took a while to edit these because I have a lot to learn about astrophotography, but it’s a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to continuing to practice. Check out my first attempt a month earlier here.