Another World

Self portrait panorama from my recent trip out to dry salt lakes in Western Australia. The window of opportunity appears to be quite small at the beginning of milky way season - the difference of a couple of weeks can dramatically change their appearance as the pressure ridges may rupture. High temperatures and low rainfall (despite storms nearby) gave me some confidence that the pressure ridges maybe evident. Arriving at my first destination in 40C (104F) temperature I was greeted by what I had been seeking for the past few years. I launched my drone to help do some scouting. I had a few technical issues as my phone appears to be dying and it kept disconnecting from the drone requiring me to work on reconnecting or bringing it back home. Satisfied with the scout, I foot slogged it out to where the ridges had not yet cracked yet formed enough texture that I wanted - and used my hand held gps to mark the locations for setting up 2 cameras for later. Trudging on the dry salt sounds a bit like hiking on hardened snow - that slight crunch under my boots. Getting up at 11:30pm (after 3-4 hours sleep)- I made my way back out into the dry lake and setup a timelapse. While waiting, I just enjoyed the silence and the stars - counting maybe a dozen meteors streak through the sky and feeling very small against the milky way. The last time I imaged from here there was intense green airglow and it was repeated again that night. The crescent moon rising helped to light up the foreground and bring out more of the textures.

Canon 6d Tamron 15-30mm @ 15mm F3.2 ISO 3200 60s x 31 (two rows with the top row tracked) image panorama with a crescent moon rising
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