At Night in the Joshua Tree National Park

So I want to make the most of my time out here. Fact. Recently one of my very good friends asked me if I would be interested in spending a couple if nights camping out at Joshua Tree National Park. It is something that I have always wanted to do, but my first reaction was "It's December and you know it is going to be freezing cold in the desert right?" to which she replied "Yes". Well OK then. As long as we both knew that we were going to freeze our backsides off then that was OK.

A test shot of the sky from our campsite. You can't really see it clearly from here, but a third in from the right is the Milky Way. It was amazing to see so clearly!

I had been to the Joshua Tree park before, and I promise I will get round to writing about that another time, but one of the reasons I was so excited to go on this trip was to see the stars. Sleeping out in the middle of the desert was the perfect opportunity to do this, and I wasn't disappointed. Never before had I seen the Milky Way so clearly, and this was just looking up at the sky with the naked eye.

Joshua Tree and the night sky in the glow of the campfire.

The problem I always have is that I just want to take photos of everything. You can look at the same view from many different angles with light catching it in different ways and it becomes a totally different scene. These two pictures here are looking up at the sky from under the Joshua Tree. It is more silhouetted when you look at it normally, but the long exposure from the camera really showed up the orange glow which came from our campfire. It was a shame that I couldn't capture how the moving flames made the shadows dance!


So my friend is pretty handy with a camera and so promised to help me try and get some shots of the night sky. I have an entry level DSLR from a few years back now which although by today's standards is not super-duper, I love it and it is more than enough for me to try and get my brain around and attempt to learn how to use it properly.

You can just make out Orion's Belt and Sword in the top right quarter of this picture.
It was the very first constellation that I was able to identify when I was a kid.

There are lots of calculations and other things that you need to consider when taking night shots, all to do with focal length and exposure time and shutter speed etc to make sure that you can get a clear shot without the stars tracking giving you blurry shots or lines going across (the world is spinning after all). None of which I am going to pretend I have a good understanding of, but there is a lot of good information out there if you are interested in it.

The red lines that you can see are aeroplanes marking out their flight paths. 

I know that I do not have the right lens or remote or other things to get some truly spectacular shots, but I just wanted something that said "Hey, remember this? You were there!". So we waited for night to fully fall (I was very impatient as I was very excited) and drove to the middle of the park, and so  here is my offering of the best shots that I managed to capture.

A car drove past when taking this one which lit up the rock formations that you wouldn't have otherwise seen.

One of the things that I was surprised about, was that despite being in the middle of the desert there was still so much light pollution around. These actually made for some of the more interesting shots, well, some of my favourites anyway.

Messing around with torches in the foreground

This is the same tree. To the naked eye the horizon was dark.

Some of the shots were really surreal. I swear that this one was straight from the set of an original Star Trek episode! Any minute now Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock are going to come running out of the sides with phasers set to stun...  It doesn't look real at all, but I promise that it is!

California or a galaxy far far away? You decide (and yes I do know I am referencing different SciFi here).

The fact that the terrain out here is extremely different to anywhere else I have ever been makes the horizons in these photographs really interesting. In my imagination, Joshua Tree National Park is the nearest that I will ever come to walking on Mars. 

I also saw my first bob cat as it ran across the road in front of us - I was glad that I was safely in the car at that point. Alas it was too quick for me to be able to get a photo!

You can just make out the plough/big dipper to the right of this one.

Unfortunately after a while a strong wind had picked up and so we couldn't get any more reasonable shots due to the camera shaking. A bit of me was disappointed, but a little was also a little pleased, as this place is so eerie at night when there is not really anyone else around.

Light Pollution from the city, which was about 15-20 miles away.

All in all it was a great experience, and despite it being freezing cold at night, we had armed ourselves with enough blankets to keep us toasty warm. If you ever get the chance to go look at the stars like this then you should definitely do it!!