Devils Golf Course, Death Valley National Park

What I loved about this image is the process I went through in capturing it as much as the image itself.

Most of my astro images are either shot from my yard (and I’m blessed to be in a Bortle 1/2 zone), or a workshop, or some occasional opportunistic shot on a non-photography focused trip. This picture I planned ahead of time. I was travelling to Death Valley for a daytime b&w workshop, but new I wanted to try to get a nice astro image in. I used all the planning tools I had available – PhotoPils to understand the potential time windows, TPE and Google Earth to pre-evaluate several locations (since I knew I’d have limited time to daytime scout in a rather huge park). And all of that worked! The image was lovely (though I could have arrived 30 minutes earlier and caught the lanfscape with a kiss of moonlight before it set to the west). I also ‘loved’ that because I missed a frame in the sky, I had to work really hard on getting a manual stitch going in ptgui to save the effort.

Lots of lessons learned and good validation and practive of the skills I’ve learned from Brad.