Last weekend, I suddenly found myself with a relatively new Mercedes (My Tundra got smashed and this was a rental, long story) and a free weekend. I had been waiting for an excuse to head out to Joshua Tree National Park, and after getting a Mercedes which needed to be driven combined with the Camelopardalid Meteor Shower due to show up at 10 PM, I jumped in the car and took off for the dessert.
Long story short, I spent two mights shooting the White Tank area of Joshua Tree. On Friday night, the meteors never really showed up but the sky was amazing. On Saturday night, I got out there a bit earlier and scouted out my locations a bit more. I had a decent spot to shoot the rock arch and shot the Milky Way coming up over the Rock Arch for almost 2 hours before packing up. It was nearly 1 AM when I turned around to shoot one last pano, and that is the shot that you see here.
The irony with this particular shot is that I had just recently become fascinated by the phenomenon known as "airglow."Airglow is caused by various processes in the upper atmosphere, such as the recombination of atoms, which were photoionized by the sun during the day, luminescence caused by cosmic rays striking the upper atmosphere and chemiluminescence caused mainly by oxygen and nitrogen reacting with hydroxyl ions at heights of a few hundred kilometres. (Wiki)
I had just been mentioning to some of my buddies that it would be great to be able to shoot it at some point, but from what I have read, it didn't seem to be a very common occurrence. In fact, the night before, I took an almost identical pano at exactly the same time, and there was no trace of airglow to be seen. But in this particular set of shots, the greenish streaks along the horizon aren't some type of white balance problem. They are, apparently, particles in the upper atmosphere that are glowing after the sun has long since set. I should probably also mention that this phenomenon is not quite the same thing as the Borealis.
It certainly isn't the cleanest pano I've ever shot as I bumped the tripod and accidentally tweaked the focus too far as I grabbed my camera out of the bag in a near stupor, but I just wanted to post this shot as I've never witnessed this before, and I honestly didn't notice it until I got home and began looking through my shots. I'll be headed up to Yosemite this Summer to shoot the Milky Way from Glacier Point, and I'm hoping I get lucky there as well.
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William McIntosh Photography
