Astrophotography

Stanley Moonset

I'm excited to share this pic! Stanley was SO DAMN amazing, the moon was setting and lit up the foreground just perfectly.. I did minimal editing on this to keep it as natural as possible! Im so in love with shooting astro photos, every trip is unique and magical, I swear every time I'm out I learn so much more than just camera settings and compositions..the cosmos have me brainwashed!

Crescent Moon

I couldn't let that beautiful crescent moon go down without showing her some love!

Stanley Lake Reflection

It was a beautiful night in Stanley, battled the clouds and moon for some nightscape pics!

Blacks Creek Milk

I couldn't sleep last night knowing that clear nights have been few and far between so I snuck out about an hour away and snagged some milky way shots till dawn. On this one I was playing around with a different focal length than I normally shoot, this is at 35mm. Hoping for more clear skies soon!

Star Trails at Konnexion Music Festival

37 minute exposure of Star Trails this weekend over Konnexion Music Festival

Konnexion Milk

This is my image from night 2 of #TheGreatMilkyWayChase I snagged this tracked and stacked image at @konnexionmusicfestival in Idaho with an astromodified camera. Nothing like shooting the night sky at an electronic music festival in the mountains with 1000 of my closest friends!

Cowboy Milky

Heres an image from night 3 of #thegreatmilkywaychase we were battling tons of clouds and wind at the Bruneau Sand Dunes but we got a decent composition anyway. Headed out tonight for night 7 to the Owyhees with my dude Nicholas Stevens, hoping for some sweet comps tonight!

Reynolds Creek

Heres 1 of the images we made for night 7 of 8 of #thegreatmilkywaychase we had a great time pounding down the roads to Silver City and looking for comps, its awesome to have a roll dawg and down af best friend to go on spontaneous creative adventures together!

Goblin Valley Composite

Happy Fathers Day to all of the amazing Dads out there. I’ve been tromping around out in the desert for the last few days at a photography workshop in southern Utah. This is a blend of 4 images that I took in Goblin Valley Utah. 3 images for a pano of the sky at 50mm and 1 image for the foreground at 18mm. We spent tons of time acquiring images and editing, this obviously has a heavy edit going for a dreamscape look in the Milky Way. Definitely learned a ton this weekend, time to level up!! Hope you enjoy the image. Have a blessed day everyone

Phallic Milky

Next up from Goblin Valley! This is my image for night 14 of #thegreatmilkywaychase There’s really nowhere else I would rather be lately than out under the stars dancing to some great tunes and reconnecting to our roots. Goblin Valley is so other worldly it’s hard not to feel totally disconnected from the day to day grind! Very excited to be putting to work all of the things I’ve learned in the last year with Astrophotography! .

The Cosmic Crapper

I shot this battling a bright moon on night 20 of #thegreatmilkywaychase figured it would be something a little different than the normal foregrounds. I had to work the next day and was sleeping in my truck, while I was waiting for the moon to set I woke up to use the restroom and saw The Milk blasting right out of the top of the outhouse the moon was lighting up the foreground pretty well so I grabbed my camera and snapped this!

Mount Saint Helens

The Cosmic Chariot

I snagged this just as the galactic core was making its way thru the middle of this old carriage axle. It was a spooky dark night in the desert, out there by yourself is a trip cause you can feel that you’re not by yourself. I had scouted this out earlier when it was light out and after sleeping in my truck for a few hours to let the moon set I raced over here set up some lighting for the foreground and started snapping away, I knew I would only have a short time that the Milky Way would align well between the wagon wheels. On the first few exposures I saw the green sky and all of the airglow and knew this would turn out to be one of my favorites images to date!

Bonneville Salt Flats

Last weekend on my way to the Southwest I stopped at The Bonneville Salt Flats to check it out and spend some time shooting the stars and battling light pollution from Wendover. Having never been here I pulled on to the lake bed around midnight like I owned the place I had no clue that it’s not a hard packed racing slick but more like a muddy marshy bog with a crust of salt over the top. I drove around throwing a rooster tail of salt from my truck for a bit until I settled on this fairly untouched foreground. I hung out on the marsh for a few hours shooting the sky it was when I left that things got interesting it was 3am and my truck was having a hell of a time driving in the stuff my tires were tread less racing slicks my wheel wells were full of salt and slowing down the tires and I was in 4 wheel drive going 10 miles an hour pedal to the floor and about to overheat, after doing a zig-zag pattern across the flats I finally found some harder packed salt to finish my escape on. The next day when I’m telling a story to a friend I find out that people get stuck out there all the time and “Salt Flats” towing makes a killing out there. Apparently they’re worried about the flats turning back into the lake due to a raising water table, anyway if you go use caution. It is pretty cool out there though

Milky Way Tail

The tail of the Milky Way! I was able to capture this thru the trees while waiting for the moon to finish setting the moon helped light up the tree bark a bit too. There’s a lot of cool detail in the upper galactic core and the tail of the MW that I’m just starting to explore.

Tracked Milky Way

This night a group of 10 of us from a workshop were on a mission to find clear skies and get some good tracked shots in Southern Utah. After an hour or so of driving we found some clear skies and a great place to post up for the night. We had a blast using our trackers and hanging out taking pictures together. This is a 10 minute tracked shot that I took, I really like the detail that was resolved in this, also processing thru pixinsight has a pretty cool outcome no foreground on this just the Milky Way.

At approximately 360 light years away the light I captured in this image was emitted from this star complex back in 1658! This is by far one of my favorite features in the Galactic Core. I had so much fun making this can’t wait to do it again! Can you see the Dark Horse?

Stanley Single Shot

Sometimes waiting for the moon to set and the clouds to leave can give some pretty dramatic effects. I was excited to get this shot because there’s a lot going on; Mars nearly in opposition, the moon setting, the clouds, the airglow, the silhouettes, the reflections!! I’m feeling very fortunate to be spending time in these beautiful locations out under the stars. Hope you enjoy the shot!

Moon Closeup

Now that Milky Way season is winding down I’ll be spending a bunch more time imaging with my telescope. Hope you’ll enjoy seeing more planetary, lunar and deep space images from me. This is a close up of the moon you can see the craters, the shadows in the craters and if you look at the edge of the moon you can see some uneven mountainous terrain

Saturn

Finally got a share worthy image of Saturn. I’m mainly posting this so I can see my progress down the road, planetary imaging is a great challenge and I plan on getting much better and more efficient at it. Hope you enjoy the image!

The Watchman

Here is my take on The Watchman in Zion National Park. Traveler of Worlds and I showed up a bit late to get any blue hour shots so we relied on the light pollution from nearby Springdale to light up the mountains and I got stuck with a silhouette foreground, luckily the airglow, colorful sky and slight haze made this composition worth completing. I had an epic Summer of road trips, making new friends and visiting new places! Can’t wait to see what’s in store for this Winter!

Andromeda & Airglow

Here’s a wide field view of Andromeda in the upper right hand corner the Pleiades in the booth right and some crazy airglow that way making shooting really tough. Luckily I got some sweet colors from it. Hoping to do some Aurora chasing this winter!

Goblin Valley

Here’s a composite image I made from my trip to Goblin Valley Utah. If you’ve never been it’s well worth the trip, very dark skies and crazy compositions everywhere! Hope you like this one! Foreground: shot at blue hour ISO 400 f/7.1 0.5” Sky: Tracked ISO 400 f/2.8 10minutes Tracker: Skywatcher Star Adventurer Camera: Sony a7rii Lens: Zeiss Batis 18mm

Sleepy Little Cabin

Idaho is definitely a rugged, beautiful and unpredictable place. My friend Tracy Lee and I worked hard and covered a ton of ground last week for a few pics and some great hangtime!. We hit some amazing hot springs and woke up in the car to snow on the ground just hours after snagging this picture. Mother nature wasn't trying to cooperate at all but we made the very best of it! Keeping fingers crossed for clear skies! This is a shot of a very bright Jupiter and Antares, the seeing wasn't the best so the stars look kind of fuzzy too!

The Hercules Cluster

The mind blowing Hercules Cluster. I captured this from my driveway in Boise. If you look towards the right border you’ll see a Galaxy all on its own that is know as NGC6207 it’s probably one of my favorite parts of the image. Also at the 4oclock position is a tiny lil Galaxy called IC4617 can you see that one? Messier 13 (M13), also designated NGC 6205 and sometimes called the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules or the Hercules Globular Cluster, is a globular cluster of several hundred thousand stars in the constellation of Hercules

Helix Nebula

Im stoked to have finished up my first narrowband image taken right here in my driveway in Boise. Narrowband imaging is classed as using filters that only allow a very narrow band width of light through them, in this case the Hydrogen alpha that I collected is assigned to the red channel and the Oxygen iii that I collected is represented by the green and blue channels. Using these filters blocks out light pollution and allows me to image faint nebulae from town and while the moon is out. The Helix Nebula was created at the end of the life of a star similar to the Sun, when the star evolved into a red giant and shed its outer layers. The star’s outer gasses, expelled into space, are lit by the remnant central core of the star, which will become a white dwarf when it cools down.

Rosette Nebula

I've been wanting to image this nebula since before I started doing Astrophotography and it all came together for me this weekend at the Alvord Desert in Oregon. Dark skies, cold temps, awesome company and good running equipment finally lined up! I've spent the last month watching tutorials, taking classes and practicing every night on my image acquisition and post processing techniques which came together well in what is probably my favorite Astro image so far. The Rosette Nebula is a large spherical H II region located near one end of a giant molecular cloud in the Monoceros region of the Milky Way Galaxy. The open cluster NGC 2244 is closely associated with the nebulosity, the stars of the cluster having been formed from the nebula's matter. The cluster and nebula lie at a distance of some 5,000 light-years from Earth[3]) and measure roughly 130 light years in diameter. The radiation from the young stars excites the atoms in the nebula, causing them to emit radiation themselves producing the emission nebula we see. The mass of the nebula is estimated to be around 10,000 solar masses.

Moon

It’s nice to have a stockpile of older images to process for these cloudy and smokey nights. This was from last month or the month before... sometime before the smoke over took u

I hope everyone has had a blessed and relaxing Easter. We finally had a clear night on a full moon and I got to spend some time with her. Hope you enjoy the image and have a prosperous week coming! ❤️

Andromeda Galaxy

Messier 31 AKA the Andromeda Galaxy imaged from my driveway here in Boise! Fun and challenging target. I need to get some good dark sky and some more Hydrogen Alpha data on it. Did you know someday our Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are going to collide? Who’d like a front tow seat for that??

North America Nebula

Finished up this project just in time to share it for Halloween. This is the North America Nebula but to me it looks a lot more like the profile of a skull with its mouth open... skull face nebula for today, if you will. Do you see it? Hope you enjoy the image and have a freeky deeky day! Happy Halloween The North America Nebula is an emission nebula in the constellation Cygnus, close to star Deneb about 1600 light years from Earth. The remarkable shape of the nebula resembles that of the continent of North America, complete with a prominent Gulf of Mexico. It’s oriented on its side for this image!

Pleiades

Finally got some clear skies over the weekend. This is my first good attempt at The Pleiades. Processing these images is way tougher than acquiring them but learning is half the fun right

Trona Tent

We lit a tent up with a lumecube and went to town! Had fun shooting this composition!..also caught one of the Orioniod meteors (on the left)!

Trona Trails

WE had someone drive the car past while we snapped these shots!

Trona Trails

Choppy star trails at Trona

My first successful single shot of the Orion Nebula! 1344 light years from Earth! I'm working on a couple other images of this! Its so unbelievably amazing to take photos of stuff you cant see with your naked eye! Hope you enjoy!

Made from 20 light frames (captured with a SONY camera) by Starry Landscape Stacker 1.6.1. Algorithm: Median

Made from 20 light frames by Starry Landscape Stacker 1.7.0. Algorithm: Min Horizon Star Dupe

Luna

Finally a tiny break in the clouds!

Everything Zen

Had fun this weekend shooting the Milky Way over at Leslie Gulch

Oxbow Bend

What an awesome summer of Milky Way chasing its been for me, I’ve made some great new friends and covered a ton of ground. There’s only a month or so left this far north to capture the core before she slumbers for the winter, I will be getting out at least a couple more times in hopes to get a few more goodies to stock pile for a long winter of editing. I snagged this image last new moon in Grand Teton National Park. Battling severe smoke and solar wind (the green airglow) you see in the image, but I couldn’t pass up this reflection shot. Here you see Mars on the left and a bit of the core is muddled behind the smoke but I kind of like the effect it gave. Being in bear country at night definitely gives it more of an adventurous edge, luckily we had protection but I don’t recommend going to these places at night alone without bear spray or a firearm.