First, I need to apologize for my lack of posting lately, it seems that life has been in the way of photographing anything recently. I’ll try to get out photgraphing more often so I can post more often.
Anyway, recently I’ve been wanting to photograph the Milky Way, and the best time to do it is during or close to a New Moon. The most recent one was this past Sunday, so Monday night I went up on a hill near Zion National Park to capture our Galaxy in all its glory. I got up there before sunset to get everything ready for the night’s adventure. While I was waiting for it to get dark, I decided to get some sunset photos of the surrounding peaks.
Here is the Watchman in all its splendor:
Also, here is the West Temple, with neighboring Mount Kinesava:
Not to be out done, but here are the Eagle’s Crags: 
I also chanced upon some wild flowers that were still in bloom: 
When it came time to actually photograph the Milky Way, I spent the next couple of hours photographing away, enjoying the view of the night sky, and basking in the solitude of the mountain. When I got home and processed the images, I realized that my camera was out of focus the entire time! The thumbnails looked great, but at full size every image was fuzzy and out of focus except the sunset shots.
Life can be out of focus sometimes, even though we’re looking at it and everything seems to be in focus and on track, then we view the experiences from a distance or as a thumbnail it seems to be in focus, but when analyzed and viewed up close, its blurry and out of focus and needs to be fixed or done over. The only real way to change that is to get out there and redo what should have been done the first time, having learned from that mistake and made everything in focus and better all around.
I did the only thing I could do, and that was to go back out and try again. Even though the moon is waxing and staying up longer, it didn’t affect the images in any way. In fact it helped. I was having the same issue as before of having the camera out of focus, so I focused on the moon and got some great shots of the Waxing Crescent Moon.
The bright star below the moon on the horizon is actually Venus! Anyway, I got settled in, and had a small red lantern on so I wouldn’t be stumbling all over the place in the dark. Well, I later discovered there were some unexpected benefits from that light. I was also able to fix the focus issue of the camera and got some beautiful shots of the night sky.
Here is the Milky Way in all its beauty and splendor!
Enjoy!
Kelly
West Guardian Angel
Kelly Guymon Photography 