Kitt Peak National Observatory

Author's Comments

The drive up takes longer than you expect. Forty-five minutes of switchbacks from the highway, the saguaros thinning as you climb, the Tohono O'odham land stretching out below in every direction with almost nothing on it. By the time you reach the summit at nearly seven thousand feet, you have already left the world you came from. I am here for the hour before astronomical twilight ends and the hour after it begins. That is the window. The domes catch the last cobalt of the sky while the desert below has already gone fully dark, and there is a moment, maybe twenty minutes long, when the white silhouettes of the telescopes read against a sky that is not quite black and not quite blue. After that the Milky Way arrives, and in summer it arrives with force. The galactic core rises over the southeastern ridge and there is so little ambient light up here that the stars cast actual shadow. White lights are forbidden after dark. Bring red. Bring more layers than you think you need because the summit drops twenty degrees from the desert floor and the wind finds you. The nightly program requires reservations and they are worth making, but if you are here to photograph, the structure of the evening matters less than the patience to let your eyes adjust and your shutter stay open. I have made long exposures here that came back looking like something I did not earn. That is what Kitt Peak does. The sky is so clean and the foreground so quiet that the camera records more than you saw, and you spend the drive down trying to remember what the dark actually felt like.

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