I am forever spoiled. The Dark Skies Community in Silver Cliff Colorado has ruined me.. and honestly, their Bortle STILL wasn’t a 1. LOL Their SQM averages about a 21.38, which is about a Bortle 3.
Once I find a Bortle 1, I may be completely doomed. Anyway, the location is an official International Dark Sky certified community (along with Westcliff) and have been since 2015!
I’m getting ahead of myself. Our son was getting married in the Boulder area, so we decided that after the wedding, we deserved a vacation. I was thrilled to find Red Hawk Retreat at Silver Cliff which actually included some images of the Milky Way in their Airbnb page images. I had my doubts, you know how it is, but truly, the location and the Milky Way exceeded all expectations.
The home itself was spectacular, comfortable and amazing.
The key thing, is, was, the Milky Way and being able to take pics right from the porch!! A nice solid cement porch with plenty of room (and a fire pit, but hey, only for cloudy nights, right?)
And the view even during the day was truly spectacular.
Truly though, the best was after the sun went down.
Knowing that we were going to be taking pics and using PlanitPro to figure out the best time and locations, we arrived and decided to take a nap. From about 8pm until 1am, and when we woke up, everything was perfect. There were no clouds, everything was dark (mostly, obviously there are a few people who don’t support the whole Dark Skies mindset), and the temps were nice and cool (it had been surprisingly hot for Colorado, I thought.
I started taking photos so I could stack them using stacking software. The results almost made me cry.
But it wasn’t perfect, you see, we couldn’t see the mountains being as dark as it was, so the following night, I took blue hour photos (and some earlier than blue hour since we were quite a ways away from the mountains.)
The final image after stacking and blending and layering is one of the best photos I have ever created
