First Milky Way Photo of the Year, 2025
Every year since about 2011, I’ve taken my “first Milky Way photo of the year,” a practice that has become so routine that I don’t think about it much or even mention it. This year, while freezing my extremities off in central Oregon in February, I decided that I should start paying closer attention to these “firsts.” For one thing, each “first Milky Way” is hard-earned. And I needed an excuse to make a new blog post.
So here goes: I took this panorama in the Sheep Rock unit of the John Day National Monument in February. The night was clear and cold, like most winter nights in central Oregon, with just enough occasional gusting wind so as to screw up a few of my exposures from that night (I’m assuming from some kind of minor movement, like my intervalometer swinging in the wind while dangling from my tripod). Thankfully, I had taken a number of “safety shots,” and was able to cobble together a full panorama.
The final panorama is 14 total photos, each exposure 75 seconds, for a total of about 17 minutes of capture for this panorama. Just imagine how much time is wasted when one of the frames from the panorama is unusable and I have to re-start. (I think I had about three unusable panoramas out of this session.) The field of view is about a full 180 degrees, directly north to directly south.
The night sky itself was kind of odd. You can see a pretty clear delineation in the sky where the green-yellow airglow collided with what I think was low-level pink-purple aurora, although the only thing visible to the naked eye was what I thought was light pollution coming from the north. Turns out that may not have been the case and what I was seeing was low-level aurora borealis instead. The result is pretty much pure clown vomit.
The prominence is Sheep Rock, which features a pretty complex but colorful geology. You can see some of the greenish sections of rock, which are the result of chemical weathering of a mineral called celadonite.
Thanks for looking!
