This image was made on a solo trip through Utah and Arizona in March of 2022. One of my hopes for this trip was to make a panorama of the Milky Way. The opportunity presented itself in Monument Valley, where I spent one night. The skies were clear, and the weather was below freezing after a snowstorm had passed through the area.

As the road through the park is closed at night, I walked out a hundred yards or so from the parking lot at The View Hotel. I set up and took a series of portrait-orientation exposures across the sky. The foreground was lit by the lights in the parking lot behind me. This was my first successful Milky Way panorama.

The desert Southwest of the USA makes ideal conditions for creating astronomical landscape imagery, given dark skies with little light pollution, many clear nights, and the abundance of rock formations, including the iconic Mittens and Merrick Butte, which have been featured in many movies and TV shows over the years.