Alright, welcome everyone to my 2026 collection of night images from Joshua Tree National Park and the surrounding areas. I’m super excited to be finally sharing these images, as the represent my most detailed night images yet. I truly hope you’re blown away by what you see in the coming weeks. For those of you who know me or follow me on social media (I’ve probably talked about it on here even), you’ll know that I broke my foot back in April, which put this Joshua Tree trip in jeopardy (and ultimately caused me to cancel a few others). Thankfully I was able to rally and go in early June – a month late. I wasn’t able to do 100% of what I wanted to do, but I still got a lot done, as you’ll see.
I wanted to start with this, an ode to the weird stuff you see in the desert. This is certainly the most elaborate – and beautiful, in my opinion – art installation I’ve seen around Joshua Tree. The sculpture is called Transmission, and was created by Daniel Popper, and resides on the Mojave Moon Ranch property. It is absolutely stunning to see any time of day, but of course, I wanted to capture it with the night sky, to truly elevate the mystic of the place.
I first visited the sculpture back last Fall. During that time of year, no interesting celestial objects aligned with the sculpture, so I chose to wait till this year, when Cygnus rises behind it.
To create this image I actually had to shoot the foreground and sky in completely separate locations. The owners of the property have graciously created a viewing area, but I suspected they wouldn’t want me out there all night, and the light pollution situation where the statue is located isn’t particularly great. After I captured the foreground, I used the Planit Pro and PhotoPills apps to work out what the sky would look like above the sculpture, given my view point and camera angle, and then captured the sky portion much further out into the desert.
More next week!
Dan
–Dan Thompson