To the OP: thanks for posting those literally awesome pictures.
I feel like I should share something else about the night sky to those who might be interested. Just go to a really dark place as some on here have advocated, and, if you're a city or suburban bred person, just look. When one hasn't seen it before, it is a revelatory experience like few others you may have in your lifetime.
I grew up in the LA area and then on Long Island - near NYC - and then settled in the suburbs around Detroit. I had never thought much about the night sky at all, except that it was a little better to sleep with less light coming through my widow than during the day.
I remember, when I was about 26 years old, going with an old girlfriend to visit her artist friend who lived in the woods, waaaaay off the beaten track, in the vast empty Michigan Upper Peninsula, in a couple of small sandwiched together mobile homes with the adjoining walls broken down to form a sort of fiberglass and plastic hillbilly castle. We all three sat on the steps leading up to his doorway one chilly November night, and I, certainly not expecting much, had a near religious experience when I looked up to see what seemed to be literally millions of visible stars. I was shocked, astounded. I just silently sat there, open mouthed, and stared for over an hour and a half without uttering a sound. Wow!
I repeated that same experience when out working in the deserts of California, Arizona and Utah. Shooting cars at sunup and sundown brought me to places where light pollution was almost non-existent. Sometimes, when setting up for a dawn shot, we would work on the cars and camera positions until just after the end of "nautical" dusk and then stay the night in vehicles or in sleeping bags until the just-before-dawn call time. My whole crew would typically barbeque some food, drink beer and then smell the occasional burning cigar or wafting bouquet of an assistant's trusty blunt break up the nearly perfect lack of anything from the city . After scaring the new guys with tales of scorpions and rattlers under the tarps and hearing an occasional coyote or other small critter break the otherwise eerie silence, we would all look into the sky and see the miracle of the universe right there before us, in the real world 3-D that makes those plastic glasses and Imax screens seem puny and uninteresting. I kind of wished that someone of us could play some mournful tune on an old harmonica, just to compliment what I felt were the faint voices in the desert wind of the ghosts of all those lonely cowboys of the American West who really had lived under the stars and loved it so much that they stayed living there, in the insufferable deserts and on the desolate prairies, as long as "progress" allowed.
Sometimes, pictures are not enough. Sometimes, you should just put down the camera, to not just record the world, but to live in it. The brilliantly adorned night sky, as countless generations of our long past forbears in song, story and legend saw it, is one excuse to sometimes do just that.
Regards,
David
