As I mentioned in a previous post, photographing the Milky Way in springtime sometimes requires a mixture of dedication, luck, and mild insanity. Given that the galactic core of the Milky Way is only visible in springtime during the wee hours of the morning, and that I live in a light-polluted urban area, capturing a photo which includes the most photogenic part of our galaxy almost certainly means hours of driving and a sleepless night. For me, it also means putting my trust in New England weather reports, which is a concept that makes me uneasy at best.



I had been targeting Chatham, Massachusetts as a possible location to take Milky Way shots for a few months. Chatham is situated at the “elbow” of Cape Cod, on the southeasternmost tip of Massachusetts. Because of its location along the Atlantic Ocean, the sky to the southeast of Chatham is free of light pollution, which I was hoping would mean a good, clear view of the Milky Way. What I learned after the fact, however, was that what Chatham lacks in light pollution, it makes up for by being one of the foggiest places on the East Coast of the United States, which is only actually good for viewing what the inside of a cloud looks like.



My research told me that on the night I planned to drive to Chatham, the moon would set at around 1:30 a.m., just as the Milky Way was rising in the southeastern sky. Since I had never been to Chatham, I decided to leave the Boston area at 11:30 p.m. so that I would have some time to scout out shooting locations while the Milky Way was still low in the sky. If all went as I had planned, I would have a two hour window from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. to capture the shots I wanted before astronomical twilight started to brighten the sky.



When I arrived in Chatham the sky was completely overcast. I looked at the satellite radar on my phone and found that the clear skies the weather forecasts had promised me had been delivered for literally everywhere in Massachusetts except for the area of Cape Cod where Chatham is located. Somewhat dejected, but still hopeful that the clouds would clear, I sat in my car with my face pressed against the window like a bored child on a family road trip, staring into the darkness and waiting to catch sight of even a single star.



Finally, at about 2:15 a.m. I saw a break in the clouds. Cautiously optimistic, I walked the beach near where I parked and realized that with only a few feet of powdery sand visible between the dunes and the waves, and there wasn’t much to put in the foreground of a photo aside from a dead horseshoe crab, which seemed a bit too morbid for the mood I was going for. Then again, many of the stars we see in the sky are already dead and we're simply waiting for the light from their final blaze of glory to reach our eyes, so now that I think about it more, maybe a petrified horseshoe crab posed in front of the night sky would have been more appropriate than I had originally thought...