As the sun was setting, John Andersen grabbed his camera, hopped into his car, and drove westward from the city limits in search of his elusive nighttime photography subject. For astronomers like Andersen, capturing the Milky Way has traditionally been a nighttime endeavor – it requires working in complete darkness, free from any sodium city lights obstructing the view.
Hailing from Calgary, Andersen expressed to Epoch Times his willingness to put in great effort to capture the central core of our galaxy. Scientists believe this core revolves around an unseen black hole with a mass roughly 4 million times that of the sun. Andersen mentioned that the galaxy appears brightest in the autumn. To capture it, he had to venture into a dangerous road, deep into remote and rugged mountains where wildlife often roamed the nighttime roads, with large feline predators stealthily observing wary visitors.
During his drive, Andersen nervously watched deer and cattle roaming near the roadside, while navigating through swarms of insects that pelted the car like raindrops. As dusk descended, he safely arrived at Sheep River Falls in Kananaskis, Alberta. The sky was clear. He should have no problem using his manual digital SLR camera to aim at the supermassive central star cluster of our galaxy.
“This was one of the clearest nights we’ve experienced,” said the 68-year-old Andersen, who works in the oil industry during the day. “It was during a new moon phase, so I had a window of time free from moonlight interference to capture the galaxy.”
After setting up his tripod in the darkness, Andersen carefully navigated the steep and treacherous slopes around the waterfall. At some points, he had to contend with another kind of “danger” that often plagued his work – crowds of other photographers. But on this particular night, there were only two other men present watching the waterfall, and Andersen was eager to show them his equipment and enthusiastically narrated the magnificent sky unfolding before them.
He explained to them that this area falls under Bortle Class 3, a designation indicating minimal light pollution in the direction of the galaxy, allowing for the detailed structure of the Milky Way to be visible, and even distant galaxies and nebulae to be seen, with globular clusters even visible to the naked eye.
However, even with all favorable environmental factors – darkness, new moon, clear weather, and lack of crowds – Andersen still couldn’t sidestep the ultimate cosmic “photobomber”: Elon Musk.
“Starlink has been an issue as soon as I started going out for shoots in the past ten years,” he remarked about SpaceX’s global satellite communication project. “Elon keeps launching batches of Starlink satellites into orbit.”
“I had some time-lapse shots and those satellites looked like machine gun bullets streaking across the sky, there are so many satellites – I’m not exaggerating,” Andersen chuckled, “It looks like a scene out of a movie.”
These newly launched satellites fly at a high enough altitude to remain sunlit from above, glinting brightly from high altitudes. Since they haven’t fully dispersed in space yet, they appear as a chain of unknown flying objects or a pearl necklace crossing the night sky.
Andersen began his amateur photography career fifty years ago, and with the advent of digital cameras – able to capture images beyond what film cameras could achieve – he became one of the pioneering nocturnal photographers. Back then, he and the local photography club began searching the countryside for dark sky spots to capture comets, auroras, and of course, the Milky Way.
He enjoys incorporating water features with starry reflections into his work, often seeking rural ponds and water bodies – like the Forget-Me-Not Pond located north of Sheep River Falls in Kananaskis. The road leading there is equally perilous. “There are wild horses there,” he noted, “and they are often out at night.”
If encounters with cougars and bighorn sheep arise during his journeys, Andersen often chooses to meet up with one or two photography companions and prefers to travel light. He believes this is safer. Out in the wilderness, equipment can become unusually heavy – especially when carrying devices like star trackers that were standard in the era of film astrophotography.
Despite the current trend of more portable and powerful AI smartphone cameras, Andersen still adheres to the fundamental principles of photography, opting for manual settings over automation. His method involves stacking multiple photos to generate galaxy images, which helps reduce noise, eliminate unwanted satellite trails as much as possible, and sharpen details.
Andersen visits dark sky locations across Alberta weekly for photography. He mentioned recently capturing some magnificent green auroras, forming “dunes” on the prairies of Wheatland County. When asked where he plans to drive next to capture the night sky, he simply replied, “Wherever the sky is clear.”
Below are more galaxy photos captured by John Andersen.