VLBA Radio Telescope at Night under the Milky Way Galaxy, Owens Valley, California
The Owens Valley is home to a variety of radio telescopes. This particular radio telescope, photographed with the Milky Way galaxy rising above it in the night sky, is part of the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a system of ten widely spaced radio telescopes that make certain forms of high resolution interferometry possible. The VLBA radio telescopes, which are each about 10 stories high when pointed straight up, range from Hawaii in the west to New Hampshire in the east. The VLBA radio telescopes are controlled from a central location in New Mexico. Large amounts of observational data are recorded at each VLBA telescope site, then sent to a single data processing lab where they are pooled and analyzed on very powerful computers.
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| Radio telescope antenna, part of the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). The Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) is a system of ten radio telescopes which are operated remotely from their Array Operations Center located in Socorro, New Mexico, as a part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). These ten radio antennas work together as an array that forms the longest system in the world that uses very long baseline interferometry. Image ID: 28787 Location: Big Pine, California, USA |
Prints of this image are available here. If you like this image, you might check out my landscape astrophotography website or my gallery of landscape astrophotography photos on this website.
Panorama of San Diego City Skyline at Dawn, Storm Clouds and City Lights
I arrived very early one morning at one of my favorite spots from which to photograph America’s Finest City, only to find the sky engulfed with thick storm clouds. However, as my eyes adjusted to the dark and I could see the pastel colors that spread outward from the city and painted the clouds above, I realized how fortunate I was to have this opportunity to photograph San Diego’s beautiful bay-front skyline underneath a ceiling of colorful storm clouds. Since the light levels required a long exposure to properly photograph scene, I managed to make one panoramic image before the light show was over. This occurred about 45 minutes before sunrise, when there is barely any sunlight showing (just a glimmer on the southeastern horizon, just above Coronado Bay Bridge on the right). Artificial light from San Diego’s downtown buildings as well as cars making the early morning commute on Interstate 5 and over the Coronado Bay Bridge produce the light illuminating the underside of the thick storm clouds. For a short while this artificial light is balanced with the approaching dawn, producing the view you see below. The colors that can be photographed before dawn (after after sunset) are much more intense than those during the day; I actually had to reduce the color saturation in the finished version of this image. This very high resolution photograph will print up to 4′ high and 13′ wide. Cheers and thanks for looking!
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| San Diego City Skyline viewed from Harbor Island, storm clouds at sunrise. Image ID: 28844 Location: San Diego, California, USA Pano dimensions: 5693 x 16813 |
Prints of this image are available here. If you like this, you might want to see more photos of the San Diego city skyline or my San Diego gallery.
Hospital Point Sunrise, Reef and Waves, La Jolla
Pre-dawn color is splashed across the clouds as small waves break over Hospital Point’s distinctive sandstone reefs. A very long exposure makes the water look silky and blurred as it breaks over the rocks and flows back out to sea. Cheers and thanks for looking!
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| Sunrise Clouds and Surf, Hospital Point, La Jolla. Image ID: 28829 Location: La Jolla, California, USA |
Prints of this image are available here. If you like this, be sure to see my Photos of San Diego and Photos of La Jolla
Sky Rock Petroglyph with the Milky Way Rising over the Sierra Nevada
The Milky Way Galaxy rises in the night sky over the Sierra Nevada, with the Sky Rock Petroglyph panel in the foreground. I’m sure the original creator of this remarkable set of petroglyphs — considered by some to be the finest petroglyph panel in the world — had even darker skies than we do today and a much better view of the Milky Way, hundreds or thousands of years ago when he chiseled these strange shapes into the desert varnish of the volcanic tablelands. Cheers and thanks for looking!
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| The Milky Way at Night over Sky Rock. Sky Rock petroglyphs near Bishop, California. Hidden atop an enormous boulder in the Volcanic Tablelands lies Sky Rock, a set of petroglyphs that face the sky. These superb examples of native American petroglyph artwork are thought to be Paiute in origin, but little is known about them. Image ID: 28798 Location: Bishop, California, USA |
Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel at Sunrise, Embarcadero Marina, San Diego
The blue pre-dawn sky, with just a hint of the color that is to come with sunrise, serves as a backdrop for the distinctive towers of the Manchester Grand Hyatt hotel, overlooking the yachts in their slips along San Diego’s Embarcadero marina. Cheers and thanks for looking!
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| Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel at sunrise, viewed from the San Diego Embarcadero Marine Park. Image ID: 28818 Location: San Diego, California, USA |
If you like this be sure to see more San Diego Photos.
Sunrise over San Diego Marriott Marina
Dawn breaks over the San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina, as viewed from the San Diego Embarcadero Marine Park. Cheers and thanks for looking!
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| San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina, and Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel (left) viewed from the San Diego Embarcadero Marine Park, sunrise. Image ID: 28819 Location: San Diego, California, USA |
Prints are available here, and if you like this be sure to see more San Diego Photos.
Botanical Building and Lily Pond Reflection, Balboa Park, San Diego
The Botanical Building in San Diego’s Balboa Park, at 250 feet long by 75 feet wide and 60 feet tall, was the largest wood lath structure in the world when it was built in 1915 for the Panama-California Exposition. The Botanical Building, located on the Prado, west of the Museum of Art, contains about 2,100 permanent tropical plants along with changing seasonal flowers. The Lily Pond, just south of the Botanical Building, is an eloquent example of the use of reflecting pools to enhance architecture. The 193′ by 43′ foot pond and smaller companion pool were originally referred to as Las Lagunas de las Flores (The Lakes of the Flowers) and were designed as aquatic gardens. The pools contain exotic water lilies and lotus which bloom spring through fall. Cheers and thanks for looking!
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| The Botanical Building in Balboa Park, San Diego. Image ID: 28824 Location: Balboa Park, San Diego, California, USA Pano dimensions: 6045 x 9876 |
Prints of this image are available here. If you like this, be sure to see my Photos of San Diego.
Surfer and Beautiful Sunrise on Hospital Point Beach, La Jolla
Each winter I try to add fresh and appealing images to my San Diego and La Jolla portfolios. I spent Thanksgiving morning on the rocks at Hospital Point. It was truly a sunrise for which to be thankful. I made two fine photographs which will look great printed at 24″ x 36″ and framed on the wall. This is the first one: while small waves appear blurred over the rocks, a lone surfer contemplates things before heading out into the water. Cheers and thanks for looking!
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| Sunrise Clouds and Surf, Hospital Point, La Jolla. Image ID: 28830 Location: La Jolla, California, USA |
Prints of this image are available here. If you like this, be sure to see my Photos of San Diego and Photos of La Jolla
Skip Stubbs in the Sea of Cortez (2013)
From Skip:
We had a very pleasant 9-day diving trip from Loreto to La Paz this year in mid-October. We lost one day of diving due to TS Octave, which passed right over us south of Loreto. We were tucked into a cove and only got lots of horizontal rain. We saw all the usual critters, nothing spectacular, and had nice weather conditions after the storm. Nice warm clear water, especially near La Paz. I took lots of “selfies” with my new dome port.
Click on the image for more great underwater photos!
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Full Moon over Pauma Valley, Panoramic Photograph
Pauma Valley at night, viewed from atop Mount Palomar, with the full moon and stars high above. This high resolution panoramic image will print up to 100″ wide — Prints available! Cheers and thanks for looking!
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| Moon and Stars over Pauma Valley, viewed from Palomar Mountain State Park. Image ID: 28751 Location: Palomar Mountain State Park, California, USA Pano dimensions: 6487 x 14971 |
New Work - September 2013
During the last few months my photographic efforts have been limited so I have just a few images to include in this release. These new works arise from photography efforts at Guadalupe Island (Mexico), the White Mountains, Yosemite National Park, the Owens Valley, a blue moon evening along San Diego Bay and Palomar Mountain State Park. Many of these images were shot at dusk, dawn or at night. Partly this is due to a major shoulder overhaul in February that required me to take a year off of underwater-, backpacking-, wave- and other strenuous types of photography. This put me into “old man mode” and I was humbled into finding relatively sedentary photo pursuits. For the past several years, I have been building a portfolio of landscape astrophotography images for editorial and natural history licensing. So I decided to dedicate 2013 to more of this “landscape astrophotography” as it was easily tolerated by my mending bionics. (Landscape astrophotography consists of nothing more than hiking to a cool spot, waiting around for the sky to get dark, shooting a few photos and hanging out with friends, only to stumble back to the car in the dark and drink coffee on the drive back to the hotel as the sun rises.) August and September included a few such night photo outings that produced five of these favorite seven. Click on any one of them to see more. Cheers and thanks for looking!
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| The OVRO 40 meter Telescope, part of the Owens Valley Radio Observatory located near Big Pine, California, USA. The telescope is used to conduct interferometric observations along with the other telescopes in the observatory, as a Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) station and as a single dish instrument. Its main focus today is on the monitoring of blazars. Image ID: 28796 Location: Big Pine, California, USA Pano dimensions: 7153 x 11978 |
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| Perseid Meteor Shower and Milky Way, Andromeda Galaxy and the Pleides Cluster, over Half Dome and Yosemite National Park. Image ID: 28746 Location: Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park, California, USA |
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| Blue Moon, Full Moon at Sunset over San Diego City Skyline, approaching jet with headlights appearing in front of the moon. Image ID: 28753 Location: San Diego, California, USA |
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| Ancient Bristlecone Pine Tree at night, stars and the Milky Way galaxy visible in the evening sky, near Patriarch Grove. Image ID: 28786 Species: Ancient Bristlecone Pine, Pinus longaeva Location: Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, White Mountains, Inyo National Forest, California, USA |
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| Guadalupe Island at sunrise, panorama. Volcanic coastline south of Pilot Rock and Spanish Cove, near El Faro lighthouse. Image ID: 28758 Location: Guadalupe Island (Isla Guadalupe), Baja California, Mexico Pano dimensions: 4224 x 25926 |
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| Great white shark, research identification photograph. A great white shark is countershaded, with a dark gray dorsal color and light gray to white underside, making it more difficult for the shark’s prey to see it as approaches from above or below in the water column. The particular undulations of the countershading line along its side, where gray meets white, is unique to each shark and helps researchers to identify individual sharks in capture-recapture studies. Guadalupe Island is host to a relatively large population of great white sharks who, through a history of video and photographs showing their countershading lines, are the subject of an ongoing study of shark behaviour, migration and population size. Image ID: 28765 Species: Great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias Location: Guadalupe Island (Isla Guadalupe), Baja California, Mexico |
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| Ancient Bristlecone Pine Tree at night, stars and the Milky Way galaxy visible in the evening sky, near Patriarch Grove. Image ID: 28782 Species: Ancient Bristlecone Pine, Pinus longaeva Location: Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, White Mountains, Inyo National Forest, California, USA Pano dimensions: 5237 x 8556 |
Milky Way and Stars at Night Over Mount Rainier
In this single image (not a composite), made with a special combination of low-light camera and extremely fast lens to best capture the details and colors of the gas areas of the Milky Way, our galaxy rises in the night sky over Mount Rainier. A few specks of light can be seen on the mountain itself — these are the lights of climbers who are ascending the mountain. A few months earlier or later and this composition, with the Milky Way aligned directly above the extinct volcano, would not have been possible. I was fortunate with weather, having tried to make this image several nights only to be shut out by heavy cloud cover even at the high altitude setting of Sunrise. On my last evening of the trip, I was lucky to have clear skies and spent most of the night, alone in a meadow with the sounds of small animals flitting about, photographing the stars as they wheeled in the sky over the Mount Rainier.
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| Milky Way and stars at night above Mount Rainier. Image ID: 28732 Location: Sunrise, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, USA |
If you like this, check out some of my other Milky Way photos, or photos of Mount Rainier. Thanks for looking, and cheers!
New Work - August 2013
I made a series of very short trips to photograph Yosemite National Park, Death Valley National Park, Crater Lake National Park and Mount Rainier National Park, along with a brief visit to the Alabama Hills. Here is a small sampling of the images I made over the last couple months; click any one of them to see a larger gallery of just the good stuff! Cheers and thanks for looking!
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| Panoramic photo of Crater Lake National Park. Image ID: 28675 Location: Crater Lake National Park, Oregon, USA Pano dimensions: 3271 x 10669 |
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| Mount Rainier is reflected in the calm waters of Reflection Lake, early morning. Image ID: 28703 Location: Reflection Lake, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, USA |
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| Milky Way and stars at night above Mount Rainier. Image ID: 28731 Location: Sunrise, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, USA |
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| Mount Whitney and Lone Pine Peak over the Alabama Hills. Image ID: 28691 |
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| Venus sets over Manley Beacon and the Panamint Mountains, viewed from Zabriskie Point, evening, stars. Image ID: 28677 Location: Zabriskie Point, Death Valley National Park, California, USA |
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| El Capitan and clouds lit by full moon, stars, evening. Image ID: 28695 Location: El Capitan, Yosemite National Park, California, USA |
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| Crater Lake and Wizard Island at sunrise. Image ID: 28668 Location: Crater Lake National Park, Oregon, USA |
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| Mesquite Dunes sunrise, dawn, clouds and morning sky, sand dunes. Image ID: 28688 Location: Stovepipe Wells, Death Valley National Park, California, USA |
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| Paradise Meadows, wildflowers and Mount Rainier, summer. Image ID: 28715 Location: Paradise Meadows, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, USA |
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| Milky Way and stars over Crater Lake at night. Panorama of Crater Lake and Wizard Island at night, Crater Lake National Park. Image ID: 28641 Location: Crater Lake National Park, Oregon, USA Pano dimensions: 7650 x 13389 |
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| Full moon over Zabriskie Point landscape. Image ID: 28676 Location: Zabriskie Point, Death Valley National Park, California, USA |
New Work - June 2013
To go straight to the good stuff and skip the verbiage: New Work June 2013.
I released some really strong images in June 2013, including some from what is perhaps the most photographically productive southwest trip I’ve ever made. I froze my ass off during cold May weather high in the White Mountains and soon after sweated my ass off hiking through the parching heat of Utah desert to reach the Wave - fun! This is an eclectic group of images, starting with an image of iconic Scripps Institution of Oceanography Research Pier with the setting sun perfectly aligned within its pillars. I also produced new astrophotography images (night-time star photos) from Zion National Park, Valley of Fire State Park, Natural Bridges National Monument, Vermillion Cliffs National Monument (including the Wave), Yosemite National Park, the ancient Bristlecone Forest in the White Mountains, Mono Lake and my own backyard of Torrey Pines State Reserve. Here is only a small sampling; click any image to see a richer gallery of the good stuff! Cheers and thanks for looking!
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| Scripps Pier solstice, sunset aligned perfectly with the pier. Image ID: 28475 Location: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California, USA |
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| Light Beam in Upper Antelope Slot Canyon. Thin shafts of light briefly penetrate the convoluted narrows of Upper Antelope Slot Canyon, sending piercing beams through the sandstone maze to the sand floor below. Image ID: 28570 Location: Navajo Tribal Lands, Page, Arizona, USA |
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| The Wave at Night, under a clear night sky full of stars. Photographer is illuminating the striated rocks with a small handheld light. The Wave, an area of fantastic eroded sandstone featuring beautiful swirls, wild colors, countless striations, and bizarre shapes set amidst the dramatic surrounding North Coyote Buttes of Arizona and Utah. The sandstone formations of the North Coyote Buttes, including the Wave, date from the Jurassic period. Managed by the Bureau of Land Management, the Wave is located in the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness and is accessible on foot by permit only. Image ID: 28620 Location: North Coyote Buttes, Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness, Arizona, USA |
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| Owachomo Bridge and Milky Way. Owachomo Bridge, a natural stone bridge standing 106′ high and spanning 130′ wide,stretches across a canyon with the Milky Way crossing the night sky. Image ID: 28541 Location: Owachomo Bridge, Natural Bridges National Monument, Utah, USA |
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| The Virgin River Narrows, where the Virgin River has carved deep, narrow canyons through the Zion National Park sandstone, creating one of the finest hikes in the world. Image ID: 28575 Location: Virgin River Narrows, Zion National Park, Utah, USA |
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| Milky Way over Tioga Lake, Yosemite National Park. Image ID: 28521 Location: Tioga Lake, Yosemite National Park, California, USA |
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| Broken Hill and view to La Jolla, panoramic photograph, from Torrey Pines State Reserve, sunrise. Image ID: 28464 Location: Torrey Pines State Reserve, San Diego, California, USA Pano dimensions: 3867 x 7787 |
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| God Beams, clouds and afternoon light over the Pacific Ocean. Image ID: 28479 Location: Del Mar, California, USA |
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| Mammoth Peak over Tuolumne Meadows, Tioga Pass, Yosemite National Park. Image ID: 28514 Location: Yosemite National Park, California, USA |
Panoramic Photographs of Crater Lake National Park, Oregon
Crater Lake National Park is the most panorama-ready national park I have ever visited. The vistas are sweeping from the rim of the extinct volcano’s caldera, encompassing a six-mile wide lake. I have made two short visits to Crater Lake National Park, and spent most of my time composing panoramic photographs of the lake, the caldera rim and Wizard Island jutting up from the middle of Crater Lake. All of these panoramas will reproduce well to enormous sizes in case you see something you would like to have hanging in your office lobby and in the living room of your home. Cheers and thanks for looking!
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| Panoramic photo of Crater Lake National Park. Image ID: 28675 Location: Crater Lake National Park, Oregon, USA Pano dimensions: 3271 x 10669 |
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| Self portrait at sunrise, panorama of Crater Lake. Crater Lake is the six-mile wide lake inside the collapsed caldera of volcanic Mount Mazama. Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and the seventh-deepest in the world. Its maximum recorded depth is 1996 feet (608m). It lies at an altitude of 6178 feet (1880m). Image ID: 19130 Location: Crater Lake National Park, Oregon, USA Pano dimensions: 2726 x 9677 |
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| Milky Way and stars over Crater Lake at night. Panorama of Crater Lake and Wizard Island at night, Crater Lake National Park. Image ID: 28641 Location: Crater Lake National Park, Oregon, USA Pano dimensions: 7650 x 13389 |
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| Panorama of Crater Lake from Watchman Lookout Station, panoramic picture. The Watchman Lookout Station No. 168 is one of two fire lookout towers in Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon. For many years, National Park Service personnel used the lookout to watch for wildfires during the summer months. It is also a popular hiking destination because it offers an excellent view of Crater Lake and the surrounding area. Image ID: 28633 Location: Crater Lake National Park, Oregon, USA Pano dimensions: 4885 x 11229 |
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| Crater Lake panoramic photograph. Panorama picture of Crater Lake National Park. Image ID: 28663 Location: Crater Lake National Park, Oregon, USA Pano dimensions: 4169 x 10222 |
Mount Rainier, the Milky Way galaxy, Star Trails and Climbers’ Lights at Night
On my recent trip to Mount Rainier National Park, I had one particular image in mind, and I managed to achieve something very close to what I envisioned with this photograph. Seen here is the northeast side of Mount Rainier, with star trails in the sky and climbers’ lights tracing their paths over Rainier’s snow-covered slopes. The colorful area of the sky to the left of Rainier is the Milky Way moving through the sky from left to right as the Earth rotates, intentionally blurred in a time exposure but still recognizable. I’ve used this technique a number of times this summer to good effect, to make Milky Way images somewhat different than the norm. Cheers and thanks for looking!
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| Milky Way and stars at night above Mount Rainier. Image ID: 28726 Location: Sunrise, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, USA |
Blue Moon over San Diego City Skyline
San Diego City Skyline at Sunset with a Rare Blue Moon
Tonight I was fortunate to photograph a rare “blue moon” rising at sunset over San Diego’s beautiful city skyline. This view is from Harbor Island looking across San Diego Bay toward the downtown waterfront. Tonight’s full moon is indeed a “blue moon”. What is a “blue moon” you ask? Typically a season, such as summer, will have only three full moons. On those occasions when four full moons occur during a given season, the third full moon is called a “blue moon”. (Note the oft-quoted “second full moon in a single month” is actually incorrect!) Remarkably, a jet plane on approach to San Diego airport flew right in front of the full moon, and the light of the setting sun just balanced that of the rising blue moon allowing a photograph to be made showing the jet with its headlights on against the sharp detail of the moon, with San Diego’s beautiful skyline set below. No photoshop trickery here. The jet is a tiny black spot on the moon in the first image below, but since this photograph will print beautifully up to 24″ x 36″ you’ll be able to see the jet clearly set against the moon in the print hanging in your living room or office lobby! Cheers, and thanks for looking!
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| Blue Moon, Full Moon at Sunset over San Diego City Skyline, approaching jet with headlights appearing in front of the moon. Image ID: 28753 Location: San Diego, California, USA |
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| Blue Moon at Sunset over San Diego City Skyline. The third full moon in a season, this rare “blue moon” rises over San Diego just after sundown. Image ID: 28754 Location: San Diego, California, USA |
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| Blue Moon at Sunset over San Diego City Skyline. The third full moon in a season, this rare “blue moon” rises over San Diego just after sundown. Image ID: 28756 Location: San Diego, California, USA |
If you like this, please check out more of my San Diego City Skyline photos.
For you photographers that might wonder: this is a single raw image, with no local processing applied (only global adjustments for white balance, saturation, contrast and sharpness), and the moon is not composited. There are a few minutes each day when the exposure of for the moon is within a stop or two of the correct exposure for the landscape, and at those times a balanced moonrise or moonset photo can be taken with a natural, honest-looking moon that requires no photoshop compositing. Personally I have never composited the moon (or the sun for that matter) into a composition, it never looks natural to my eye. Cheers, and thanks for looking!
Perseid Meteor Shower, Milky Way, Half Dome and Yosemite National Park
Perseid Meteor Shower, Milky Way, Half Dome and Yosemite National Park
I spent two evenings at Glacier Point during the peak of the 2013 Perseid Meteor Shower, hoping to capture my first photographs of meteors. I have a few landscape astrophotography images that have chance meteors recorded in them, but this was to be my first attempt at photographing meteors as the principal subject. Conditions were nearly ideal. There were virtually no clouds on either night, little wind, and the air was dry and clear, perfect for astrophotography. This image is the result of those efforts, showing the Milky Way galaxy, about 16 meteors, Half Dome and Tenaya Valley and some of the Yosemite High Country in the distance, and the amphitheater at Glacier Point with a few people (and lights) enjoying the evening’s show.
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| Perseid Meteor Shower and Milky Way, Andromeda Galaxy and the Pleides Cluster, over Half Dome and Yosemite National Park. Image ID: 28746 Location: Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park, California, USA |
As you might imagine, this image is a composite. The Milky Way was aligned above Half Dome in just this way during the mid-evening. Note that the Andromeda Galaxy can be seen as a oval blurry object just above and to the left of Half Dome and to the right of the Milky Way, and the Pleides star cluster is seen at the lower right of the sky, just above the horizon. The individual meteorites, however, came from separate images taken over the course of 12 hours of continuous photography. I selected the best exposed and brightest of the meteorites that I photographed, rotated them about Polaris (the North Star) as necessary to account for the fact that the night sky “rotates” above us all night long, and composited them with the baseline image of Half Dome and the Milky Way. A little green “air glow” is seen near the horizon, and some distant smog or haze is also seen as a brown horizontal layer just above the horizon in the distance.
The Perseid Meteor shower, which is considered to have the brightest meteors of all annual meteor showers, is named for the constellation Perseus from which they appear to emanate. Note that most of the meteors in this image appear to radiate from the lower portion of the Milky Way in this photograph — that’s where the constellation Perseus lies.
Zodiacal Light, Milky Way and Jupiter over Yosemite National Park
Photographing Zodiacal Light over Yosemite National Park
August 11-12 was near peak viewing for the 2013 Perseid meteor shower, and many people including myself were viewing the show from Yosemite’s Glacier Point all evening long. However, because the moon was nearly new and it was late summer, I knew there was an opportunity to see the faint, remarkable Zodiacal Light the following morning. My plan was to let my cameras run all night capturing Perseid meteors until about 90 minutes before sunrise, when I would reset them to photograph the (hoped for) Zodiacal Light. I managed to get a couple nice images of Zodiacal Light, better than my one previous attempt!
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| Zodiacal Light and planet Jupiter in the northeastern horizon, above Half Dome and the Yosemite high country. Image ID: 28745 Location: Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park, California, USA |
Zodiacal Light arises from sunlight that reflects off a disk of space dust that orbits our inner solar system. Zodiacal Light is purely a solar system phenomenon (relatively local to our planet) and is not associated with stars that are observed alongside (behind) it. The aforementioned “space dust” is thought to arise primarily from asteroid and meteor collisions (Nesvorny and Jenniskens, 2010), and resides on the plane of the ecliptic. (The plane of the ecliptic is the plane in which planets orbit around our Sun.) While aligned with the plane of the ecliptic, this dust cloud is not thin. Because it extends outward from the sun to the vicinity of Jupiter (with its strong gravitational field), the dust cloud is disturbed in such a way to give it a thickness, explaining the width of the Zodiacal Light that we observe. The Poynting-Robertson effect causes this space dust to slowly spiral inward toward the sun (where it is consumed), so a constant supply of new dust from colliding comets and asteroids is required to maintain the dust cloud. Sunlight reflecting off this dust can be seen in our night sky when there is little or no competing moonlight and/or light pollution from nearby cities. Zodiacal Light appears as a faint pyramid or triangle glowing on the horizon, with the apex of the pyramid tilted in line with the path of the Sun and the plane of the ecliptic. In these photos, planet Jupiter (which lies in the same plane of the ecliptic as our Eath and follows the Sun’s path through the sky) is clearly seen as the brightest object within the triangle of Zodiacal Light. This view is roughly northeast, looking past Half Dome from Glacier Point with the Yosemite High Country in the distance and Little Yosemite Valley at bottom middle.
The faint northern arm of the Milky Way is also discerned in these photos, crossing from upper left to lower right.
Mount Rainier and Reflection Lake Panorama, Sunrise
Mount Rainier is reflected in the perfectly still, calm waters of Reflection Lake, in the southern part of Mount Rainier National Park, Washington. This enormous panoramic photo will print up to 6′ tall by 15′ wide at full resolution. If you think this image would look good on the wall of your office lobby or in your home, please contact me. Cheers, and thanks for looking!
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| Mount Rainier is reflected in the calm waters of Reflection Lake, early morning. Image ID: 28705 Location: Reflection Lake, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, USA Pano dimensions: 6921 x 17081 |
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Updated: December 11, 2013
