Capturing the Dark Sky

By Bob Lane

When I was a boy, there was only one street lamp on Tennyson Terrace, a block away at the intersection with Transit Road.  Few homes used porch lights when they weren't expecting company.  And in this near-dark, the Milky Way hovered so close over my head that I knew that when I grew up, I would be able to touch it.  Now, like most Americans, because of light pollution, I can't even see it.

Gregg M. Erickson can see it.  He travels hundreds of miles, and sometimes climbs ten thousand feet, to see it.  And when he does, he touches it.  With his camera.

The Milky Way over the Glow of Salt Lake City

Dark Sky West,  an exhibit of his full-sky photographs of the Milky Way, is showing at the Gig Harbor campus of Tacoma Community College, at least through February.   Nine are on display in the school lobby.  Others will be rotated throughout the showing.

Erickson is a son of former Tacoma News Tribune reporter Jim Erickson. He teaches business computer sciences at Cal Poly is San Luis Obispo, California.  Two and a half years ago, he was a well-paid, corporate consultant, traveling the western states.  In his gallery brochure, Erickson said he had grown weary of airline travel. He elected to drive from Los Angeles to Denver.  Stopping at Blue Mesa Reservoir in Colorado, he was overcome by the sight of the brilliant night sky.  The experience changed him.  He quit his job and began traveling through the western states, photographing the stars "in all the dark places of the American West" with a digital camera, "where you can actually see the Milky Way."  

"There is a lot of light pollution going on," he said.  For instance the lights of Las Vegas are visible on the horizon from 150 miles in all directions.  In his striking photograph of the Mobius Arch, he said, "you can actually see the lights of L.A., from about 200 and some-odd miles away." He found that completely "pure" skies are rare:  "There a few places in Nevada, where you can get completely away, where there are really pure skies."

Many of his images show the Andromeda galaxy prominently, even though the light has traveled for one million years to reach his camera.  He said his photos "are presented as truthfully as possible.  Colors and brightness are a result of an exposure lasting several minutes."

Once his images were downloaded into his computer, Erickson digitally "stitched" them together, creating a seamless, full-circle view of the heavens.

Because of the wrap-around effect of Erickson's wide photographs, the straight-line Milky Way is portrayed as brilliant arcs.  The effect is stunning.  The scenes vary from the table-flat landscape of the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah to a candle-lit Mobius Arch in California.  

Besides those photographs on display in Gig Harbor, Erickson has more he is preparing for a show in California.  Some may be seen on a website at DarkSkyWest.com.  "That's my dedicated website for the images.  There are over a hundred images."  His two years of photographic adventures are chronicled on his personal website, NWicon.com.

Jim Erickson, center, listens to son Greg

Erickson estimates he has some 125,000 images in his computer files.  He talked about how he captures them during a computer hookup recently from the Cal-Poly campus.  

Erickson cites one cold night "on the summit of South Sister, which is this absolutely brilliant Cascades volcano outside of Bend, Oregon.  And you have to get up and out of the tent at 1 in the morning, and you're freezing.  And your fingers are frozen, and you're fumbling with a camera, and you're setting up the tripod at 11,000 feet.  And you're freezing, you know, and it would be so easy, you know, to just roll over and say, forget it, I'll just do it later, I'll do it some other time.  It's about forcing yourself to go through with it and do the job."

"There's a good story behind just about every image,"  Erickson said.  He's considering compiling a book about his Milky Way pilgrimages.  

Each one of the photographs in the gallery is comprised of 15 or 20 digital images "stitched" together--a computer blending of the edges of each scene to make one continuous image.  "About a minute and 40 seconds is the exposure that I use for each one of these images."  He uses an ISO of some 1200 to 1600--compared to an ISO of about 100 for point-and-shoot cameras.  Still, he constantly battles to balance a rapid shutter speed with a highly sensitive ISO exposure rating.  That he has been successful is evident in the delicate shadings of his night skies, with almost undetectable movement of the stars.


In his computer "darkroom," he uses "Hugin," an open-source image-stitching program to create his finished photographs, preferring it to the more popular Photoshop.

Erickson believes his full-sky images would not have been possible if he had to rely on "film" cameras.  Digital has surpassed film in image quality in perhaps the last four years, he said.  "There are some camera backs that can produce a hundred-million pixels."  (Point-and-shoots use perhaps a few million pixels, points of light, to create an image.)  He believes "the Nikon D90 in 2009 was the first digital camera to offer better resolution than Kodak 35mm. Kodachrome."

Erickson uses "very ordinary cameras" in his nighttime work but combines them with high-quality lenses, some adapted from old film cameras.  Currently, his workhorse is a Nikon D7000, "a very basic camera, obsolete by today's standards."  He said fine work "is really less about the camera and more about the location and the technique.  Somebody with $1,000 or $800 can easily get a camera that can do some of this stuff." 

Erickson shoots with "a very special wide-angle, 14mm. lens; it has a 2.8 aperture.  Very fast, very wide-angle."    He shoots vertically in multiple exposures, tilting the camera from the horizon to straight up, to capture the Milky Way. 

Erickson said his photographic quest is not for fame or riches:  "I really wanted to just establish a dialogue, and to show what is happening in the American West.  And to get people to appreciate the night sky.  It really is something that humans have been able to observe basically since the eye evolved.  

"For about 500 million years, we have had this connection to the night sky.  And we're losing our connection with it; there are a number of people who have never seen the Milky Way with their own eyes.  I think a part of my work is to get people to appreciate how great it really is, and to see this great sky, and to know that we are a part of this greater system of planets and stars, and to know how wonderful it really is."