Southern Utah offers a fantastic array of landscapes and some of the darkest skies in the world, a combination ideal for nightscape photography. Goblin Valley State Park, off Hwy 24 on the road from Hanksville to Moab, is one of those special places that deserves a visit.
I planned this trip to coincide close to the new moon, and enjoyed clear skies perfect for night photography. The Three Sisters, a named rock formation in the park, made for a great foreground against the backdrop of the Milky Way.
I used an LED panel to light up the foreground, and then, without moving the camera, captured a series of exposures of the night sky.
Back home, I processed all of the exposures with DxO PureRaw and then used Starry Landscape Stacker to create a stacked image of the sky. The foreground and sky frames were then combined in Photoshop, and further processing was employed to produce the finished result.
Being alone in the desert in the middle of a dark night is a special experience. The only sounds I heard were the distant cries of coyotes. I have fond memories of this night and hope to make a return visit sometime in the near future.
