Great Sand Dunes
South Central Colorado boasts some of the darkest skies in the lower-48. Between the high base elevation and the tall 14er peaks blocking any city lights, this area is perfect for watching the Milky Way. Visiting the Great Sand Dunes in May gave me a great opportunity to take a shot at Milky Way photography.
Being able to clearly shoot the Milky Way comes down to three main factors: time of year, moon cycle and location. Being in the Northern Hemisphere, the Milky Way is only visible in the sky around the summer months, mainly March through September. Likewise, photographing near a new moon, which occurs roughly every month, reduces light pollution in the sky and gives a chance for great Milky Way photos. Finally, avoiding light pollution is a must. Luckily, my trip to the Great Sand Dunes yielded all three.
The Shot
Once the search ended, I began my driving journey, parking right before a bridge heading over the Rio-Grande. On the midway point of the bridge, I set up my tripod on the shoulder and a Milky Way app on my phone so I could track the position of the stars. Then it was a waiting game. Over the course of 3 hours, I played around with various ISO, shutter speeds and compositions, making sure to keep an eye on where the Milky Way was rising. Every 30 minutes, I would head back to the car and download some photos to hone in on my ideal settings: around 8000 ISO and 15 second exposures. My adventure ended at 2am and after a short drive back to Alamosa, I was able to rest for a full day in the Great Sand Dunes.
Some Images from the Night
Finding My Shot
My adventure began in the nearby town of Alamosa Colorado, where I aimed to find the perfect location to shoot the Milky Way. Combining data from an online light pollution calculator, radar forecasts, a Milky Way augmented simulator app and simple line of sight weather predictions, I was able to scour for my perfect location.
Road Access: Evidently, if this shoot was to happen between 11pm and 2am, being walking distance from a road that could be easily driven down would be a massive plus. This allowed me to restrict my search on google maps.
South Facing: The Milky Way rises along the southern horizon. I needed to make sure that any spot I chose was not blocked by mountains (or sand) in the south.
Clear Skies: My trip to the Great Sand Dunes was plagued by heavy (and I mean heavy) winds. Although the winds died down in the evenings, dust (and regular) clouds had still remained in the skies leading into the night. By using radars, and looking across the horizons, I could use my best judgment to work and avoid potentially cloudy conditions.
Composition: What's the point of going through all this effort to take a picture in front of a boring field? Although I knew this was a possibility in the search, I of course looked for potentially interesting natural features to compose my photos.
My search led me slightly south of Great Sand Dunes National Park, near the Colorado - New Mexico border and right on the Rio-Grande river.
The high winds convinced me to stay at lower and more covered elevations for the rest of the day. Exploring the visitor center, some forest trails and nearby villages for food got me until sunset, where I decided to shoot from along the west facing park road. A nice, but overall cloudy, sunset ended my time in my 33rd national park and had me continuing into New Mexico towards Santa Fe.
The Winds
With an early wake up, I was ready to go and explore the National Park. However, >50 mph gusts threatened my plans, making it uncomfortable and borderline painful to be around the dunes. Nevertheless, I continued with my plans to reach the peak of High Dune, the tallest dune on the first ridgeline of the dunefield and one of the tallest in North America. There are no maintained trails in the dunefield so the journey was completely up for me, and with massive gusts, I was just about the only one willing to make the climb to the top. After about an hour battling up the dunes, I made it to the top ridgeline and began the short hike to the top of the dune. But with a massive sand storm looming in the distance (and knocking me to the ground twice), I decided I was well high enough for my liking. A quick run down the dune and over the Medano Creek completed my hike.
The Winds give interesting leading lines for photos