Autumn in the Desert

From the photographer: “After my October 20, 2012 Night Sky Photography workshop in Southern California’s Joshua Tree National Park, a friend and I wandered off to try some more photos. Though it doesn’t look like it, I was lying on my back with the camera a few centimeters off the ground and aimed nearly straight up! Even in the light of the nearly first quarter moon, the autumn Milky Way arches beautifully across the desert sky behind the magnificent Joshua Tree, and the Pleiades star cluster—a sure harbinger of winter in the Earth’s Northern Hemisphere—glistens on the lower right.”