Milky Way Photos | Ben Coffman Photography

Freezing cold takes – combing the archives during social…

Like many of you reading this, I’ve spent the vast majority of the past three months at home. For the first two months I didn’t go into grocery stores. I didn’t go into home improvement stores. I didn’t go for a drive. I barely took any new photos, and when I did, I didn’t leave my yard. I just did what I could at home with what I had. This included making weird, incomplete meals, like burritos without wraps or spaghetti with only the sauce and meatballs. And working in the yard, of course.

My indoor time was spent reading online articles ranging from the absurdly optimistic (“Clinical trials advancing quickly! We’ll have a vaccine very, very soon!”) to outright depressing (“We’re all going to die and nothing will be the same.”)

But the silver lining in all this is the amount of time I’ve had to go through my unpublished photos and review them. And I cannot express enough how big of a deal this has been (and will be) for me.

Over the past five years or so the pace of my little photography career had increased rapidly. Workshops and private lessons both in Oregon and throughout the West meant that I was spending most of my time helping clients acquire and post-process photos and doing very, very little of my own acquisition and post-processing. I struggled to post-process my own work when I was away from home.

These unpublished photos were an albatross around my neck. I had a hard time staying motivated creatively. And it’s very difficult to return to a place like Arches National Park for another round of night-sky photos when I haven’t even fully found out what I got the previous time.

My photographic process has always been about refining and improvement, either via my vision, my in-field techniques, my post-processing techniques, or, in some cases, my gear. I felt like I had skipped this crucial step over the past few years, and I owed a lot of that to an inability to mine my archives of its full potential.

I’m not finished with my backlog yet. But I already feel much better about it and am on track to finish it.

Here’s a sampling of night-sky photos I’ve finally had the opportunity to work on and publish. It only took the external forces of a global pandemic to make it happen.

Crumbling rocks in the Utah desert, beneath a Milky Way sky filled with green-yellow-orange airglow. As of the time of publication, this photo (taken two years before), has about 8,500 views on Flickr!

The Milky Way arches over Death Valley’s Racetrack Playa and its famous sailing stones. Multi-row panoramas of the night sky can be somewhat difficult and time-consuming to put together, so of course they’re some of the last photos that I get around to processing.

The Milky Way arches over the summit of Mauna Kea, with the Keck Observatory being closest (in the left of the frame). Glow from Kiluea’s 2018 eruption can be seen along the horizon at the middle-right of frame.

STEVE in Oregon – A (long) look back at…

On June 1, 2013, after a few weeks of sporadic aurora activity, I had decided to drive up to Mt Hood’s Trillium Lake to take some photos of the sunset, twilight, and night sky. Over the previous year I had noticed a steady uptick in the number of photographers that would set up along the shores at the lake, but this particular day/night was still in the halcyon pre-Instagram days, where the odds were, if other photographers were there, I would likely know them, and there was plenty of lake shore to spread out and work together.

Shockingly, I did not own a smart phone at the time. I know, I know…the times were different. About an hour after sunset, my wife, who was at home and had an Internet connection, called me to tell me that the KP had jumped up. I immediately looked to the north, and, could just make out faint glimmers of aurora activity in the blue twilight sky.

I settled in and started snapping photos. As the sky got darker the show became more and more clear: Red-pink vertical columns danced above Yellow-green blurs of aurora low on the horizon.

And then something strange happened.

To the northwest of Trillium Lake is an unnamed hill that’s about 500 to 1,000 feet higher than the lake itself. Slowly, over a couple of minutes, a bright band of glow worm-like light grew out of the hill and began to arc across the sky over the lake, so high that it was nearly touching the sky’s zenith. I angled my 14mm lens upward, trying to capture the full display, but it was impossible. I struggled to point my camera straight up; my ballhead and a knob or two on my tripod simply weren’t allowing me to do it. I could’ve reconfigured my center column to get the angle I wanted, but in the dark with limited time I decided to just shoot what I could.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I’d just met STEVE (strong thermal emission velocity enhancement), years before STEVE was even STEVE.

And in just 5 minutes, the phenomenon was gone. The strong arc expanded, wavered a bit like it was flapping in the wind, and then it broke up, leaving the aurora display much lower on the horizon to continue on strong.

Strong thermal emission velocity enhancement (STEVE) appears over Trillium Lake and Mt Hood, Oregon. — Strong thermal emission velocity enhancement (STEVE) appears over Trillium Lake and Mt Hood, Oregon, June 1, 2013. To my knowledge this is the only photo I know of that features STEVE in Oregon.

The above panorama was assembled from 4 or 5 photos to give a greater field of view of the scene. I thought the result was better than any of the frames individually, as I was able to show the lake, a tiny sliver of actual foreground in the lower left corner, a nearby tree (on the left), and then a good amount of sky. (Just to illustrate, Polaris can be found about 4/5ths up in the center of the photograph, and Polaris is about 45 degrees above the horizon. I’m guessing my final result was 60 or more degrees of sky, along with foreground just a few feet in front of me.

I put together a quick gif that shows some of STEVE’s movement over a minute or two.

Fun Camp – Uncovering Death Valley’s forgotten history

It’s Fake News Friday!

“Fun Camp”

In the mid 1800s, with a booming gold rush turning once-filthy miners into Izod-shirt wearing, boat-shoe clad member of the nouveau riche, the miners of Death Valley decided to upgrade their standard of living and send for their estranged families. Unfortunately, as the kids of Death Valley soon discovered, there wasn’t much to do in Death Valley other than work in the mines. Landscape photography was a pursuit relegated to opium addicts and the criminally drunk, and social media bullying still hadn’t been invented. Children, tired of traditional diversions such as “Kick the Cat” and “Whip the Burro,” were in desperate need of some entertainment.

This necessity resulted in a number of children-oriented structures being built: First, a one-room schoolhouse, then a hugely unpopular wooden slide, and finally a high-elevation summer camp perched far above the valley floor and away from the valley’s main settlements. This camp was aptly named “Fun Camp.”

With the summer weather in Death Valley being generally unfit for both man and beast, the mothers of Death Valley had sought out a location at higher elevations where they could drop their kids off for the summer to learn some of the lost pioneer arts of their forefathers, such as animal husbandry, husband wifery, and fence whitewashing. At 4,000 feet above sea level, the location for Fun Camp was a bit of an anomaly, as it rarely exceeded 60 degrees Fahrenheit all summer long due to coastal zephyrs that, as one 19th century writer put it, “Flowed o’er the seas, gathering up its coolness and finally spat that coolness upon the upper flank of the Panamint Range like so much chewing tobacco in a spittoon.”

During the spring of 1866, dozens of barracks were built. In the summer of 1866 the first group of kids moved in. Over the following decades a number of improvements were made to the 15-acre grounds, including something called a “swimming hall,” rudimentary thrill rides, and what historians later believed to be a sacrificial altar.

But despite all this fun, the camp had its problems. Hilarious but fatal dingo attacks were reported to have occurred on a somewhat frequent basis, and even the most basic of injuries were treated poorly, mostly because not a single adult was onsite from June to August, a detail that the mothers of Death Valley had overlooked in their desperation to rid themselves of a seemingly never-ending chorus of “We’re boooooored.” Some things never change!

In 1931, the newly formed Child Protective Services made raiding Fun Camp their first order of business. The camp was closed, and CPS cited unsafe living conditions, amusement park rides that had been both created from and fixed with duct tape, and a plethora of shallow unmarked graves filled with tiny child-sized bones as the reasons.

The Milky Way, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars shine brightly over these abandoned structures in Death Valley National Park. For licensing or prints, please use the "Contact Me" form. — The Milky Way, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars shine brightly over these abandoned structures in Death Valley National Park. For licensing or prints, please use the “Contact Me” form.

Pictured in this photo are Fun Camp’s swimming hall, the pub, and the ticket booth for the world’s very first Tilt-a-Whirl. The structures have been preserved impeccably because of the quick and decisive work of a collective of historians named the Fathers of the Eastern Sierras, who in 1933, two years after Fun Camp’s closing, loaded a dozen 20-mule-trains with some 80,000 gallons of epoxy resin and made the long and arduous trek up to Fun Camp, where they used the epoxy resin to coat the entire site for posterity, thus preserving an important but oft-forgotten part of American history.

With age comes invisibility – an infrared Milky Way…

Taking infrared photos often doesn’t give you a lot to work with in post-processing; if you’re only allowing a very small portion of invisible light and NO visible light to reach your camera sensor, the results are going to be fairly limiting, from an exposure, contrast, and color perspective. Those of us who shoot infrared realize this, which is my many infrared shooters choose to convert their photos to monochrome. This also is why the vast majority of infrared shooters take photos during the day.

But the results that can be achieved by shooting infrared at night can be…well…interesting. I took this infrared panorama in April of 2017, and you can see many of the familiar objects of the night sky. Notable is the bright Antares (mid right), which still looks the red-orange color you’ve come to expect. However, you can also see how strangely infrared rendered the rest of the night sky. Airglow seems to disappeared entirely. And of course the spring vegetation in the desert has fluoresced into some really interesting colors.

Plants fluoresce and an oddly-colored Milky Way shine brightly in the sky over Joshua Tree National Park, California, in this panorama. For licensing or prints, please use the “Contact Me” form on the right side of the page.

Baja camp with Milky Way

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).

A vibrant Milky Way and three planets glow over my camp in Baja California Norte, Mexico, in March of 2018. For print or licensing inquiries, please use the "Contact me" form to the side of this page. — A vibrant Milky Way and three planets glow over my camp in Baja California Norte, Mexico, in March of 2018. Click photo for a larger version. For print or licensing inquiries, please use the “Contact me” form to the side of this page.

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.