Our three night stay at Arches National Park was in the Devils Garden Campground. Eighteen miles from the park entrance, the campground is located in the middle of red sandstone fins, boulders and rocky hills, Utah juniper and pinion pines, yucca and prickly pear cacti. The La Sal mountains can be seen in the distance. There are also a few arches nearby. One of them, Skyline Arch, was only a short walk and climb from our campsite, though climbing up into the arch itself was a bit of a stretch.
The nearest town, Moab, is 23 miles away, so there is very little light to pollute the night sky, making the campground a great place to view the wonders of the night sky.
Like most U.S. national park campgrounds, Devils Garden has no hookups for water, electricity, or sewer. Facilities do include potable water, picnic tables, and grills, but there are no showers. There are 50 sites that can be reserved between March 1 and October 31. This is a very popular campground and, for anyone who would like to camp here, I would recommend making reservations.
Selected Information Resources:
Arches National Park.
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I love the photo of the night sky. About 2 miles from me a friend lives on top of a hill well away from street lighting. I remember the first night I left her home after a meeting in wintertime. The sky was like black velvet speckled with stars. I just stood there mesmerised for about ten minutes.
That was the first time I ever got decent photos of the night sky. I had tried before, but this time was successful. A few nights after this we went to a “dark sky” ranger talk at another park. It lasted well over an hour and they had tracking telescopes set up so the attendees could take a look at various night features.
I also love the pic of the night sky, Mike. Do you remember the settings you used?
There’s a face in the arches picture
Looks like a snake or a caterpillar, with its mouth gaping wide.
The best of the images had the following settings:
Manual exposure; 40.6 seconds; f/3.5; focal length 18 mm (equivalent to 27 mm for 35 mm SLR); 1600 ISO.
As best as I can recall I did post processing to brighten the image, darken the background, and increase color saturation.
Face? Maybe a sand(stone)worm.
Hi Mike .. beautiful part of the world .. and I loved seeing the scenery and the skies at night – I’m sure the talk must have been very interesting .. cheers Hilary
The talk was interesting, but long. The neat thing was realizing that once your eyes become adjusted, you really can see by starlight. Not well, of course, but enough to move around and get in line to use the telescope and sense where other people are.
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