I’m always so impressed by the density of the stars when I go up there that I thought I’d try to capture some of it with the camera.

I brought my tripod and the wide-angle lens up specifically to play with at night.

At first, I was fiddling with the settings at the campfire.

With this second one, I was trying to capture the slight glow of the trees reflecting the campfire, with the stars shining brightly between them. That didn’t work so well; what looks like a star is a speck of dust on the lens, and the trees didn’t read red to plain eyesight.

After that, I walked out past camp to the road, right at the little-one lane bridge. I was trying out different exposure times, but since I was running on bulb, I really had to guess.

This first one showed as completely black on my LCD screen, but when I lightened it at home, it was this beautiful blue. Still, it doesn’t capture the intensity of the stars or the luminosity of the black sky.

I held this one a little longer, and I think it does a better job. It was amazing how easy it was to see out there, with no moon at all and away from camp. I could make out the white gravel road and the silhouettes of the trees were plain as day against the sky. The only true black up there was the shadows of the trees; the sky itself glowed as black does on a computer monitor, as if there’s a light behind it and it’s just trying to fake being black.

This last one was the best. I held the shutter open for three minutes, until my finger got tired. I caught an airplane going across the sky at the top, and the exposure was so long that you can see the paths the stars took.

None of these images portray what I wanted them to, but I like them anyway.

After I put the camera away, I noticed that Don still wasn’t around. He’d been trying to get that one last dog in and we couldn’t reach him on the radio. So I drove up to where he was sitting on a point, and that’s when the whole bowl of the universe slammed me. I sat there and contemplated the immensity for an hour and a half; that would have been a much better place to play with the camera. I saw four meteorites, and really wished that I had someone to share that sort of thing with. Don’t get me wrong, Don’s a good sitting partner; nice and quiet unless he has something to say, but there are times when that’s not quite the sort of companionship that I crave.

A warm and pleasant evening; contemplation just makes me a little lonely sometimes is all.