Friday was dex night and April is the start of Milky Way season, so I headed out to Anza-Borrego State Park to take some pictures. I’ve already learned the hard limits of my camera for this kind of photography, and there’s nothing I can do about this: it has a small sensor and produces noisy long-exposure images at the high ISOs you need for night sky photography. However, its lens also maxes out at 24mm, which is nowhere near enough to capture the entire Milky Way, and there is something I can do about that. I’ve been playing around with panoramic shots using Photoshop’s merge function and I was curious to see if it would work on the night sky. What if I took a whole series of photos and stitched them together?

Photoshop seems to have trouble with images that have lots of fiddly bits, so I wasn’t hopeful. To my surprise, though, it had no trouble at all. The picture below is four wide by three high (though I probably cropped out most of the upper row of images) and Photoshop put all twelve together with no fuss at all.

I took this on San Felipe Road looking southeast. The city light at the bottom is from Ocotillo, about 40 miles away. The planet above the light dome is Jupiter, with Saturn below and to its left. The key thing in night sky photos taken in the desert is the wind, which can whip up dust that obscures the colors. But the air was still on Friday, so the colors came through fairly nicely. In the end, this was quite successful, but it’s still taken with a camera that’s barely up to the task, which means I had to underexpose the image and then heavily Photoshop it. There’s no way around this, unfortunately.

Still, not bad, and I have one more that turned out fairly well. I’ll put it up later this year.

April 25, 2020 — Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate