Beautiful Sights from the Desert

Because we don't have many flowers yet, I'm going to focus on the beauty of the desert for this Flower Friday.

I love the rock formations that tower on all sides of us while we're in the desert. The combination of the deep red ground and blue sky makes me smile the whole time that I'm there!

Even more than the rock formations, I love seeing our Labraduo sprint joyfully on the desert mesas. My favorite spot to photograph them is Shyla's Mesa. That's the mesa that they're sprinting over in the next photo.

The mesa that the Duo was running atop is in the next photo, to the right.

Each night, I set up my camera on a tripod to take photos of the night sky. While we were at this particular campsite, the moon started out half full and was almost completely full on our last night there. It was so bright that it lit up the landscape as if it was daytime. You can see the reddish color of the desert floor due to the moonlight.

For comparison, this is what the same sky looks like when there is no moon. Look how many more stars are visible - but also notice that the landscape is black!

On a night when the moon was almost full, I took a series of exposures over about an hour and a half so that we could see the stars appearing to rotate around the north star. Due to the bright moonlight, a limited number of stars was visible but that actually makes this type of photo better. It's as if the stars are making their own art as they spin around our night sky!
I find the desert to be absolutely gorgeous, both during the daylight hours and the dark hours. I always look forward to our next visit there!!!