Category Archives: Nightscape Odyssey

A book project

4 Mount Hood

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4.1  Sabbatical Hiatus

The night at Many Glacier would be the last for my night sky photography for several weeks as I now was scheduled to meet my family in Seattle for a more conventional vacation.  In addition to the usual outdoor camping and hiking activities we typically seek, this time there was an additional agenda.  

My son, urged and aided by my wife, had selected several colleges to consider for that distant (to him) time when he would once again be called a freshman.  Somehow, he had arranged that the list contained no schools within a 500-mile radius of our home, making the process of visiting their campuses a large undertaking.  Several of the candidates however were clustered in the northwest states, and we had devised an itinerary to intermix campus tours with our other activities.

So for the next two weeks I would have little opportunity to aim my cameras at a dark sky.  But it was getting more and more difficult to do this anyway, as the moon dominated the sky until late each night.  If I thought the wait for the moon to set was long at Many Glacier, it would only get longer from here on out.

I made my way across the panhandle of Idaho, and once again across the desert of Washington, but this time crossing the Cascades into the lush land to their west.  I had errands and duties to perform in preparation for reuniting with my family, including finding a place I could trust to develop my film- both E6 and C41 type rolls.  Seattle was large enough to meet this requirement, and I would get a peek at my latent images turned real.  That peek contained setbacks and failed exposures, as usual, but also some unexpected and enchanting images.

After the college campus touring circuit came to an end, and with my son relieved to be done with it, we aimed the overloaded minivan east of Portland to the Mt Hood Recreation Area.

Nightscape Odyssey
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3.5 Dark Sky Enforcement at Many Glacier

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A daytime shot of the Many Glacier Hotel.

Glacier Park presents its most fascinating face at the end of a road that penetrates as far as it can into the body of the park before being stopped by dramatic features with names like “The Garden Wall”, “Iceberg Notch”, and “The Salamander”. At the end of the road is a hotel that is bathed in views of these mountain features and other spectacular carved peaks, many of which still bear glaciers. Hence the name of this unique place, Many Glacier.

In front of the hotel is Swiftcurrent Lake, candidate for my desired composition containing reflected star trails.  On the night I was here however, so was the moon.  I waited for it to set, a long wait until it finally fell below the horizon.  Until then it was eclipsed by Grinnell Point, looming in front of me.  Although the moon was now no longer directly visible, it still lit the sky. Film is cheap (I keep telling myself) and I never know if the sky will stay clear, so I made several exposures during the moon’s gradual hidden descent. The wind was calm, and the lake became smooth. I hoped the conditions would hold.

I dared only leave the shutter open for 30 minutes though; the sky would wash out if exposed longer. During this time the moon drifted down behind Grinnell Point, leaving a trailing glow. I looked around at the scene, wondering what else would be captured on film.

The lake had become so calm and the water was so clear that I could see the bottom! I was intrigued by the array of fallen trees and rocks and other natural lake bottom material. Then I took a larger view and found it a bit distracting. I wondered if the camera would see reflections of the stars at all. How is it that I could see this underwater debris anyway? The moon wasn’t bright enough to light the scene in this way.

The view at Many Glacier, lights on.

Behind me, the hotel guests had gradually turned out their room lights and gone to bed. But like all contemporary buildings, modern or primitive it seems, there were outdoor security lights aimed all around, including at me by the shore of the lake!

The Many Glacier Hotel is an old renovated lodge-like building. A combination of rustic log construction and swiss chalet trim makes it a novel structure at the edge of the lake. Its five stories make it seem unnaturally tall, even in an environment of tall lodgepole pines. Each floor has a lakeside balcony, each balcony connects with an outdoor stairway, each staircase with an access door illuminated by floodlights. Here was the source of my unwanted lighting.

I proceeded up the stairway, stopping at each door, and with gloves normally intended for cold-protection, unscrewed each overhanging floodlamp bulb until the entire end of the hotel became dark. It was a clandestine act, but in the name of fighting local light pollution I committed the deed.

The moon was still setting, now behind the distant peak of Swiftcurrent Mountain. Wisps of clouds were coming in, the air frequently breaking the glass surface of the lake, but I made a one-hour exposure, this time without the distraction of the foreground lake bottom.

Swiftcurrent Lake, lights off.

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3.4 The Quest for C-41

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Note from the future:
The invention of photographic film, a light-sensitive emulsion on a flexible strip, along with the access to photo labs, allowed photography to become widespread and popular throughout the entire 20th century.  But there were distinct limitations associated with film that simply don’t exist in modern digital photography.  The limited number of exposures that could fit on a roll of film was one of them, requiring careful consideration of what scenes were worthy of each precious frame.  There was also a need to keep the film safely stored away from direct light and at the right temperature and humidity.  But the most severe limitation was that there was no “preview”; each exposure was taken on faith, because the film needed to be chemically developed and printed before the success (or failure) of a shot could be determined.

I was now a week into my travels and had experienced the luck of good weather and had succeeded in making a few exposures of the night sky from my small arsenal of cameras.  Some of them were astrophotos taken at the prime focus of a telescope, and others were time exposures of the landscape rotating under a starry night.  I was starting to complete entire rolls of film (although admittedly, some were quite short—only 12 exposures.  But even if the film had not been completely utilized, I was eager to find out if my settings and techniques were working.  I would happily wind off the rest of the roll to see if those first few exposures yielded successful images.  But that meant that I would need to find a place that could develop them.  

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3.3 A Kodak Moment at Wild Goose Island

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A pre-dawn portrait of Wild Goose Island indicated by the warm glow of morning twilight on the distant  peaks.  The faint vertical bands in the blue sky are the contributions from the Milky Way.  A satellite flare cuts across the short 30-minute startrails and clouds are beginning to build in the west while this exposure was made. 

There are many iconic views of beautiful scenery in our country.  Some are identified by “scenic viewpoint” highway signs where the engineers designing and building the routes through the American landscape couldn’t help but be impressed and decided to make it easy for drivers to pull out to stop and enjoy the view too. 

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3.2 Going-To-The-Sun at Night

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The distinctive three-pointed peak of Going-To-The-Sun Mountain shows left of center in this view from Logan Pass.  The trails of the stars arc gently up to the north, and gently down to the south of true east.

The activities at the Logan Pass Visitor Center died down after sunset.  I noticed that I was now alone among a set of randomly placed cars in the parking lot. I wondered where their owners might be. The visitor center had closed hours before. Any day hiker on the trail would normally try to get back before the end of the day. Perhaps they belonged to people deeper in the park, backpackers equipped to spend their nights in truly remote regions.

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3 Glacier Park

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3.1  Follow the light, stay for the night

I thought I would have plenty of time. But I had forgotten about Highway 2. On the map it looked like any of the other roads, but U.S. 2 in Montana was different. Since it was the only way to reach Glacier Park, it had to maneuver through the surrounding mix of grasslands, river valleys and mountainous terrain. Sudden curves were sprinkled along the route to accomplish this, many of them blind to oncoming traffic. White crosses marked points where the risks had exceeded a driver’s judgment, making for a spooky drive at night, when my headlights would suddenly expose clusters of crosses at the road’s gully.

This time I was driving during daylight however, and the winding route kept my speed to a lower number than my accustomed average. I had composed another picture in my mind’s viewfinder, and I needed to get to the heart of Glacier Park before dark.

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2.4 Dinner and a Moonset

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Beautifully crafted telescopes also included superb engineering, such as this secondary mirror suspended by nearly invisible wires.

The next day’s weather was a repeat of the previous: partly cloudy, occasionally overcast, threat of rain, but then open periods of bright sun.  Alongside the coffee vendors, protective canopies were set up for astronomy-related businesses and causes. Artists, photographers, telescope and accessory retailers, social and political organizations: all had the equivalent of a wilderness storefront along “vendor row”.

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2.3 Rainy Days, Espresso Nights

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There’s always something. I managed to get the tracking and focus properly set for this shot of the Trifid Nebula, but sometime during the exposure an airplane cruised by with its running lights on.  Note the three pairs of white and red “stars” along the track from the plane’s flashing beacons.

Most attendees had given up and gone to bed with the cloud cover at midnight. A few of us accidentally enjoyed its clearing after 2:00. We took in views of galaxies, nebulas and star clusters until the near-dawn when Saturn, and then Jupiter and Venus appeared. This was the intoxicating finale of the evening, and with the brightening sky, I staggered to my tent sometime after 4:00.

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2.2 Flat Tires, Cloudy Skies

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Some of the “big guns” at the Table Mountain Star Party. Large aperture Dobsonians abounded in the telescope field. The height to the eyepiece occasionally requires a ladder, one of them is seen here, strewn like many others on the ground. Also visible in this picture are a platoon of observing tents (upper right); multi-room tents with sections that open to the sky. The threat from the clouds kept the telescopes covered and the tents closed for much of the time.

I started lugging stuff out of my car and was struggling with my oversized tent when I met my neighbor to the east, Barry, a friendly bearded fellow who reminded me of a mild-mannered graduate student.  In reality he was a programmer, but his interests fell strongly in the areas of ham radio and astronomy. He was modest about his beginner status in astronomy, but he had attended prior years of TMSP and enjoyed them immensely, hence his return this year.

Barry felt responsible for letting me know that the rear tire on my car was flat.  I was surprised at this news, since I had just arrived and had not experienced any sort of tire problems on my way up the mountain, but there it was.  It wasn’t just low on air– it was dead flat!  Had I been driving on a rubber-covered rim all the way up that road?  I suppose it’s possible, but let’s instead think that it must have happened as I maneuvered into the field. A sharp rock maybe?

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