A Night with a Joshua Tree or Two

So as the story goes I am sitting at work Tuesday afternoon minding my own business and I hear a conversation going on between some coworkers about going to Joshua Tree National Park to watch the Perseid meteor shower. This meteor shower comes around every August and this year is best seen on this particular Tuesday night in an area away from city lights. So me being me I poke my nose in and get asked if I would like to go along. At first the thought of a 1 1/2 hour drive and a really late night does not really appeal to me, but then I thought "Hey, I need some photographs to post on my site, so what the hell". So after a quick dash home to change and get my camera gear we were off to Joshua Tree. The 12 of us get there at about 9:30pm and get comfy for a long night. Someone brought along her car cigarette lighter powered Margarita blender and so some alcohol flows and eases the wait. The shower was really set to kick in at about midnight, so I used the opportunity to try and figure out how to take photos of stars in complete darkness. That wasn't as easy as I first thought, not only because I could not see a thing to change the settings on my camera. The tough part was figuring out the right exposure time to get the desired effect and a whole lot of trial and error and luck. Well eventually the meteors started to appear at a fairly regular rate and we got to see some amazing streaks across the night sky until we all got tired at about 1am and headed home.

As far as I was concerned Joshua Tree was always the title to the first U2 album I really liked when I was 17 years old. I had no idea it was a national park until a few years later and now I live just over an hour away. It's not what most people would call a pretty national park like Yosemite or Yellowstone but it has an appeal to many because of it's desolation. By the way we are upgrading a radio site in Joshua Tree, so the next time I'm there I will get some daytime pictures to show you it's desolate beauty.

For those of you wondering about the two streaks across the top of the photograph, no unfortunately they were planes and not meteors.