I mentioned in my post a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to focus on Joshua Trees this year, because as often as I visit Joshua Tree National Park, I rarely shoot them at night. I looked all around and found different wants that I liked facing different directions, so I’d hopefully come home with some unique looking images. For this particular tree, I really liked the way it looked facing towards the rising Cygnus, which is what you see here. There are thousands of these trees, so it doesn’t take a lot of effort to find one that you like, but the more traditional views looking south unfortunately suffer from more light pollution, so this was a happy side benefit of facing the other way, more or less.
For this particular scene, I used low-level lighting at the tail end of blue hour to illuminate the tree, while light pollution over my left shoulder served to illuminate the rest of the scene. Clouds were seemingly an ever present problem during my trip this year, but this particular scene turned out pretty clean!
One thing I’ve been experimenting with more and more in the integration of additional Oiii and Sii data, which is very evident in this image. The current trend in night sky photography has been to really amp up Ha (the reds), which I enjoy, but there’s more to the sky than just these features. This particular view includes more of the blue / greens associated with Oiii.
More next week!
–Dan Thompson