During my trip to Baja, my small group spent a couple nights camping near Baja’s Bahia de los Angeles (also known as LA Bay). It was an area I’d remembered visiting on a trip 15 years before, and surprisingly I didn’t think it had changed much. The quaint small town nearby was still quaint, the bay was still amazing, the weather was mostly good, and the night sky was breathtaking.

The day had intermittent clouds rolling through that made me a little nervous, but those clouds had largely dissipated by the time I awoke for a 4 am date to photograph the night sky. After leaving the tent, I was greeted with an amazing sight–the full galactic core of the Milky Way (the 28.9-degree latitude helped with that) as well as three planets: Jupiter (brightest, in center), Mars (in the galactic core), and Saturn (just to the left of the galactic core).

By the way, the yellow-orange glow you see in the sky isn’t light pollution. It’s airglow. The skies down there were fantastically dark, and there’s no way the tiny towns around there can put off enough light to affect the night sky.

Another side note: While I was taking this panorama and a couple of others, I could hear a pod of whales snuffling and splashing as they came to the surface in the strait to my left. At first I thought the noise was a change in tides, but over half an hour the noises moved from north to south, and included a couple of fins slapping the water. Additionally, a raccoon-sized animal scuttled across the rocks at the left of the frame around this time, too, but I couldn’t quite identify what it was in the dark, and my headlamp had dimmed to the point where I couldn’t make it out when I shined a light on it.

The annotated version of the photo can be seen below.