Dark site Milky Way (Ian Dixon)

Dark site Milky Way

Revision title: Young growth of healthy trees in the dark site park.

New moon, and so I took a break from imaging to walk along the gravel road at the dark site to shoot this single frame of the Milky Way.

These images deserve some explanation.

This is taken at my favourite dark site, about 100 km southeast of my city, near the Minnesota border. Its a provincial park used by campers, hikers and people like me, ha ha.

The larger trees, visible in version A, and other versions reveal that some are dead, and others look to be in poor shape. This area was the site of a forest fire some years back - another fire hit a few km from this dark site area just last year. What you are seeing are a few lone surviving trees from the old growth. The young stuff (red pine, jack pine, trembling aspen and cedar etc) are all in top shape/healthy. I will post another image to show this. Its actually a beautiful location as the young forest is both diverse and healthy.

When walking through it (which I enjoy while the rig is blazing away in auto mode) I get the sense of standing in the middle of several square km of "Christmas trees". Sandilands Provincial Forest is mainly a deciduous forest with aspen, jack pine and red pine.

One benefit of forest fires is the regrowth of young vegetation, which benefits Moose and other fauna. Other sections of this park (its huge - around 3000 km2) have been logged in decades past, with similar results, albeit far from a natural event. Our local government continues to log the forest, but I haven't visited those sections of the park.

Anyway I hope you enjoy the images of the milky way on one of our rare evenings of clear sky.

Kind regards,
Ian

Original
Final
B
C
D
E

B

Title: Young growth of healthy trees in the dark site park.

Description: This version is shown to show the new forest growth succeeding the old - which suffered a forest fire some years ago. Edit - it also to highlight the milky way. :)

Uploaded: ...

C

Title: Another look at the southern sky MW from our site.

Description: No "painting" the image in this frame.

Uploaded: ...

D

Title: Marc and his rig

Description: Clouds cut short our deep sky imaging session.

Uploaded: ...

E

Title: Heavy clouds make for a short night.

Description: We waited, but our night was cut short by unexpected formation of clouds.

Uploaded: ...

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