Milky Way Over Rainier 2013.07.13

One of my favorite photo destinations, I shot Mt. Rainier the afternoon, evening and night of July 13th and 14, 2013.

Check out the story in the serialized comments with each photo.

Part 4 - Breakfast of Champions<br />
Breakfast is at Palomino in Bellevue. We look like a couple of candidates for Electronics Anonymous. I have my phone, my tablet and my laptop. So does Rudy. Using The Photographer’s Ephemeris, we place a pin on a map of the area where we want to shoot. We dial in the date, nominally August 8th. We can now see that sunset is at 8:28. Sunrise is at 5:56 the next day. No moon. We ought to have 4 perfectly dark hours to shoot between 11:30 and 3:30 but there’s a little guesswork going on here.<br />
<br />
But will the Milky Way be visible? Will it be in the right place? It looks like the summit of Rainier is southwest of where we want to shoot. So we pull up Sky Safari, dial in August 8th at midnight, say. Point it southwest. And right there in front of us is Rainier. The Milky Way is up but it’s in the wrong place. We dial time forward and backward until 1:23 AM. There is the Milky Way shooting straight up from the Rainier summit.<br />
<br />
But we’re eyeballing compass bearings and shooting locations.

4 / 8

Part 4 - Breakfast of Champions
Breakfast is at Palomino in Bellevue. We look like a couple of candidates for Electronics Anonymous. I have my phone, my tablet and my laptop. So does Rudy. Using The Photographer’s Ephemeris, we place a pin on a map of the area where we want to shoot. We dial in the date, nominally August 8th. We can now see that sunset is at 8:28. Sunrise is at 5:56 the next day. No moon. We ought to have 4 perfectly dark hours to shoot between 11:30 and 3:30 but there’s a little guesswork going on here.

But will the Milky Way be visible? Will it be in the right place? It looks like the summit of Rainier is southwest of where we want to shoot. So we pull up Sky Safari, dial in August 8th at midnight, say. Point it southwest. And right there in front of us is Rainier. The Milky Way is up but it’s in the wrong place. We dial time forward and backward until 1:23 AM. There is the Milky Way shooting straight up from the Rainier summit.

But we’re eyeballing compass bearings and shooting locations.

Mt Rainier Washington Milky Way front page