P. Sisto Images

A capture from my only night with a view of the stars during last year's spring trip to Puerto Rico. Although I traveled there anxious to experience the Milky Way from the lowest latitude I'd ever seen it before, it was tough to find a location to photograph from. Despite looking out over the ocean, the humidity from the ocean captured light pollution from the nearby (well, 40 miles away!) city of Ponce on PR's southern coast. I found this cool ruined lighthouse that had clearly been thrashed during powerful storms over the years near Guanica.

International Dark Sky Week continues, so I wanted to share out a never-released capture of Comet C/2020 F3 (aka NEOWISE). A couple weeks after the comet reached perihelion I traveled to Little Sable Point with and to attempt to image it in somewhat darker skies than Ohio. This comet was IMPRESSIVE. Both sky and foreground were captured using my 40mm f/1.4 ART lens, illustrating the massive amount of the sky filled by NEOWISE's yellow dust and blue ion tails.Even here, the influence of light pollution from Ludington, MI on the right and Sheboygan, WI (all the way across Lake Michigan from our position) was readily apparent.

As we move into the future, with ever greatening technological achievements, it is vital to use these advancements to control man's reach into our dark night skies. The only ones who can save our views of the universe are ourselves.

This absolute marvel of a drive is the Shafer Trail in Canyonlands National Park. The road was originally created by a cattle rancher as means to drive his herd from the top of Island in the Sky mesa down 1,500 feet to the edge of the White Rim above the Colorado River. Those lights you see is a Jeep being white-knuckled down this trail in the pitch darkness by . I stood at the viewpoint operating both of our cameras. From the start of the descent to where his lights disappeared in the distance took the span of five 4-minute exposures: 20 minutes of driving for about 2 miles!

We chose to photograph this epic view as a way to feature the ingenuity of the early 20th century residents of the area, as well as to draw attention to the inescapable influence of manmade light pollution, seen in the center of the frame as a bloom intruding into the sky above the city of Moab and onto the face of the La Sal mountain range. The foreground was shot at an ultra wide 14mm and the sky as a panorama using my normal 40mm tracking setup.