Reasons to Be Cheerful

I am a big fan of the Talking Heads and David Byrne. I admire not only his music but also his passion for social consciousness, which is evident in his music, art, and writing. In 2018, he launched the web site and lecture series Reasons to Be Cheerful. Over the years their articles have been a great source of hopefulness and inspiration. 

The title of one of their latest articles, West Texas Oil Country is Revealing a Sky Full of Stars, caught my eye as my son Brian and I visited Big Bend National Park and McDonald Observatory back in April and had driven through the Permian Basin. Imagine my surprise to find that the article showcased a photo taken on that trip, the one I now use as the header for this blog and described in the post The Road to the Stars. Thanks to the author for including my image and for providing proper attribution. 

The article itself discusses the encouraging progress being made to reduce light pollution in West Texas, with the assistance of the oil industry. If you haven't been to Big Bend, you should definitely put it on your bucket list as the night sky there is truly breathtaking and must be witnessed firsthand. And make sure to attend a star party at McDonald Observatory, where scientists are conducting valuable research and the visitor staff excels at explaining the wonders of the night sky. 

Personally, I feel protecting the dark skies of West Texas is something worthwhile. In addition to the article above, you can find out more about dark sky protection in the area at web sites for the Greater Big Bend International Dark Sky Reserve and the International Dark Sky Association.

I still have addditional images and some video from our trip to share. Here is one of the Milky Way over Casa Grande taken from the Chisos Basin. This was captured with using the incredible Night Sight feature on my Pixel 7 phone. 

As always, click on images to see full-sized. 

The Road to the Stars

The Road to the Stars
neatonjr @ Flickr

After a long session capturing images of the Milky Way in Big Bend National Park for time lapse, my son Brian and I headed back to the Chisos Basin, stopping along the way at a spot I had mapped out in PhotoPills to capture a shot with a perspective view of the road ahead with the Milky Way beyond. 

Initially the plan had been to capture a sequence of relatively short exposure images with separate foreground and sky shots at different ISO, then stacking registration frames to get the highest quality result possible. Unfortunately, just as I was setting up, we saw headlights down below. With such dark skies, the headlights were obvious while the car was still on Gano Springs Road and about 4 miles away so we knew we had 5-6 minutes but that wasn't enough to capture the planned sequence, just enough to get the composition framed and focused using test shots. I went for one 30 second shot knowing I'd get a little star trailing, then we threw everything back in the car and headed to the lodge. We had finished with enough time that the other car was still a mile or more behind us.

To pull out detail in the foreground, I did initial adjustments to the sky such as exposure, curves, white balance, etc. and then used the Lightroom sky masking tool to mask the sky, inverted it and then made adjustments to lighten the foreground. After touching up some noise spots with the healing brush, this is the end result.

Image details:
Nikon D750 on Radian tripod
Irix Firefly f/2.4 15mm lens
ISO 6400
30 seconds @ f/2.8

Click on the image to see large on Flickr. 

Enjoy!