Great Basin School of Photography

The summer of 2021 will be remembered for drought, fires, and smoke, and definitely not for great night sky viewing. In the days ahead of the Perseid meteor shower, to increase your odds of getting a clean shot, it was useful to look at wildfire maps and some forecasts.

Fortunately I subscribe to the Open Summit app, and its smoke forecasts for surface and sky smoke. We had a number of foreground locations in mind, but many had to be ruled out in the last day or two before the meteor shower peak due to excessive smoke. The Dixie Fire in particular was sending excessive amounts of smoke into the Eastern Sierra, over the Sierra Nevada and White Mountains, and occasionally in plumes across Nevada. Smoke settles with cold air at night, so basins across the Basin and Range geography had a higher chance of accumulating smoke at night.

The ranges were another story. Many are high, have interesting foreground features like rock formations, and are far enough from cities and towns to have great dark sky viewing conditions. We just had to find interesting foregrounds, high enough in the mountains to shed some of the smoke settling at night.

The first night, two nights before the peak of the meteor shower, we went straight to a large playa, providing expansive night sky views, where we could see and shoot in any direction.

There was a vernal pool nearby that contained tadpole shrimp, about 2″ long. Their eggs can remain dormant in the dried mud up to 27 years! They look like fossils because their ancestry goes back about 70 million years.

Unfortunately the night photography on this night was a bust due to smoke. Hopefully the next two nights wouldn’t be like this!

The next day we scouted an interesting lava flow, which could provide intricate lava rock formations in the foreground.

Checking the smoke forecast, is seemed like a basin about an hour away could work. We checked out an interesting rock formation we had seen a while back.

We settled on a different spot a few miles north that was a little higher in elevation, hoping that the smoke turning the sun copper orange would either change directions or settle into the valley at night.

Success! The shooting conditions were darker than normal with the modest smoke lingering, but we picked up a few bright meteors, including one with a “persistent train” of smoke-like ionized air dispersing after the brightest meteor passed.

With one night to go, the best one for meteors by far, we headed into town to have lunch and gas up so we could explore a couple of valleys that we hadn’t been up yet.

We found some nice rock formations driving for hours and going through about eight private land gates and scratching up our vehicle a bit in overgrown willows. With a better smoke forecast and virga hopefully clearing the sky a bit of smoke, we decided to return to the playa that we had attempted shooting from on the first night.

This time the air quality was much better. We were greeted upon arrival with great sunset light on distant virga.

On this night the test shots were promising, so we set out some cameras and watched a few meteors.

This super=bright meteor was out of range of the cameras, but its light was picked up by all of them.

At one point a ridiculously bright, blue-green meteor lit up the sky behind me, and the entire landscape. I had time to turn around and watch it fall.

We went to bed leaving several cameras running, hoping for the best, but the clouds had other plans for our night. They moved in right where our cameras were pointing. I got up at 3:10am and re-pointed some of them at openings in the clouds, but they kept moving and closing out the meteor viewing and shooting. Here’s the first time-lapse clip assembled from that night:

It was still a cool experience. I got to see a ton of meteors, including a few fireballs and that super bright blue-green one, one of the brightest and most colorful ones I’ve ever seen. I went to pick up the camera shooting over the big puddle just as sunrise light started appearing over the horizon. The sunrise went through a nice transition from warm to cooler.

It’ll take more work than usual to pore over the cloudy time-lapse footage to see if we got enough meteors to create a decent composite from the peak night, but at least we had had a nice trip, covered some new ground, and caught a few nice phots and some meteors on the night before peak. Next year won’t have great Perseid meteor conditions, given the nearly-full moon, but there are other meteor showers we can pursue when the moon is out of phase for the Perseids.