At the end of the summer of 2015, my brother and I were out around midnight on a great rock overlooking the Pacific Ocean, enjoying the view between ourselves and the rest of the Universe. Fires inland had been burning for weeks, their pall of smoke glowing orange in the sky to the south of […]
Milky Way
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North Coast Night Lights: Dawn Chases the Milky Way
I pulled into the turnout and shut off the engine and lights. The stars jumped out and I joined them. Above the horizon the core of our galaxy glowed in the last darkness of the night. I smiled. Hello, Darkness, my old friend, I thought. It seemed apt, though it was the sight of the […]
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North Coast Night Lights: Grandmother Rock
It was nearly dark when I arrived at the Trinidad Head parking area. Sunset gazers had seen the sun set some 45 minutes earlier and were heading for their cars when I struck north up the beach. Night was descending and in the waning light I could see the footprints of the evening’s activity in […]
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North Coast Night Lights: Eel River Delta From Table Bluff
If you have ever driven to the South Jetty of Humboldt Bay, then along the bluffs just before the road descends to the ocean level, you will have passed by Table Bluff County Park. The park is graced with trails, a broad field, trees, benches and, of course, great views over the Pacific Ocean and […]
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North Coast Night Lights: The Changing Milky Way
I think many people take the night sky for granted, not realizing all that is happening in our view. It’s the night sky, what is there to think about, right? When the weather is clear, it is full of stars, there is a moon, which is probably full or else it’s a crescent, and maybe […]
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North Coast Night Lights: Camping in the King Range
The Fall Equinox of Sept. 21, 2017, found me camping beneath the stars on Paradise Ridge in Southern Humboldt’s King Range, a BLM-managed area of our beautiful and famous Lost Coast. Friends I’ve known since childhood had invited me out to join them for a night of stargazing and Milky Way photography in one of […]
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North Coast Night Lights: Close Encounters on the Avenue
The Avenue of the Giants is as beautiful a drive as you will find. The groves along its 36-mile course line the Avenue with some of the grandest examples of the tallest trees on Earth, the California coast redwood, Sequoia sempervirens. Some are thousands of years old. If a disproportionate number of my photographs are […]
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North Coast Night Lights: This Way to the Galactic Core
I found myself on a ridge line along the Kneeland Road the night of July 18, 2018, on an impulsive late-night mission to the Galactic Core. It was out there, all I needed was a stretch of road that would take me up to meet it at the horizon. We live in the Milky Way […]
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North Coast Night Lights: Milky Way Over Kneeland Snow
I was enwombed in a place of dreamlike comfort and warmth. In the honey hum of perfect slumber, I was suspended in the vibrations of the universe. Dreaming of misty sunbeams and forest floors, and floating like a butterfly. Except … Except the sound of Dr. McCoy’s medical scanner was intruding. It peeled away the […]
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North Coast Night Lights: Houda Beach Cave
It was a low tide, a low moon, the cave and the Milky Way — long had I waited for this combination to come together. And when it did, somehow, I was there. All summer I’d watched the tides, waiting for a tide low enough for me to get to the cave safely sometime before […]