Who needs sleep?

I wanted to take more star photos, maybe showing the Milky Way. That meant waiting for the moon to go down and for flights to stop for the night. So I got up at 3:00 and rubbed the crud from my eyes.

I could see what looked like a patch of hazy light off to the east that I thought might be the Milky Way. The camera saw it a lot better than I did.

A Joshua Tree against the night sky. Below is a shot in the direction of the greater Palm Springs area. Street lights and highway traffic create a lot of light pollution. But sometimes you can use it as part of the shot, like backlighting the foreground.

I still have some fine tuning to do on my camera settings. That's part of the learning process. Now, I need a nap.