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04/02/2026

Froth and foam at the coast and splashy endings

This week's big swells and king tides have brought in giant waves. At Cape Perpetua the waves crash into volcanic rocks and at Devils Churn some are funneled into a narrow inlet where they come to a splashy ending.

Turn up your sound to hear the waves

02/02/2026

Deep Sky View of the Orion Cloud Complex

To the naked eye the pattern of stars in Orion constellation is one of the most familiar sights in the winter night sky. But the sensor of a digital camera with a long exposure reveals a completely different sky. The bright, stars of Orion are nested in something called the Orion cloud complex, which is a massive stellar nursery over 1,000 light years away. This region of dust and gas contains multiple nebulae, including the famous Orion Nebula, M42 (see labelled image and closeups). Young stars in the nebulae ionize hydrogen causing the gases to glow in deep red, near infrared wavelengths. Betelgeuse, the red supergiant star of Orion is one of the young stars—its “only” 10 million years old, far younger than our sun, which is over 4.5 billion years old.

This image was captured on 1/19/2026 with 40 minutes of exposure time (40-60s exposures) using a 24-70 mm Canon lens at 50 mm and a Canon EOS Ra camera. This camera has a special sensor that is able to detect the red end of the spectrum that standard digital cameras can not.

20/01/2026

Last night's aurora over the Oregon Cascades

I was out in the wee hours imaging with my telescope on a rare clear night in Oregon winter when the aurora unexpectedly lit up the north sky around 3 am.

Shot with handheld iPhone and processed with Lightroom

12/01/2026

Draped in snow

We finally got a good snow storm in the Cascades last week. It's good to see a couple of feet of powder draped over trees and mountains, though the snow pack is still well below average for this time of year.

04/01/2026

Sunset Silhouettes

First sunset of 2026

01/01/2026

Happy New Year 2026

Hand held shots from Waikiki Beach

15/12/2025

Milky Way and meteor over Wizard Island and Crater Lake

The current streak of cloudy and rainy weather means it's time to go into my photo archive and find photos I haven't processed yet. In this case, here's an image from a cold, windy night in June 2021 when a meteor unexpectedly flashed into the scene.

Technical
Canon EOS Ra, Rokinon 24 mm f1.4 @ f2.0;
Sky: 7-stacked 60s exposures 800, Tracked with SGP.
Foreground: 1-120s exposure @ ISO 1600.
Processed in Pixinsight, PS and LR.

idadarksky

06/12/2025

Crazy-colored dawn above a snow-covered forest

Is been too warm for snow in the Oregon Cascades so far this year 😕

So I went back to images from December 2024 to find snow.

03/12/2025

Mountain majesty

Sunlight striking summit of South Sister at sunrise, November 11, 2025

25/11/2025

North American Nebula and a closeup of Cygnus Wall

This nebula, which can be seen with binoculars as a fuzzy gray patch in the constellation Cygnus, is named for its resemblance to the continent of North America. The nebula is about 2, 000 light-years away and about 100 light years across.
It glows from ionized interstellar gas irradiated by hot young stars. The second image is a close up of part of the nebula called the "Cygnus Wall", an intense star forming region of dust and gas that resembles Mexico and Central America.

I used a false color image-processing technique called the Hubble Palette (the same technique used to process Hubble Telescope images) that assigns the light from different chemical elements to red, green and blue color channels. Sulfur emissions are assigned to red, hydrogen to green and oxygen to blue. In a true color image the nebula would appear red.

This image represents almost 16 hours of exposure time captured with a 550 mm telescope and a monochrome astronomy camera using narrow bandwidth filters. The image was taken over 4 nights this past summer from several dark-sky locations in Oregon.

15/11/2025

Mountain mirage

Mt Jefferson nestled between clouds and mountains, shimmering in morning's first light.
November 11, 2025

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