We joined another Santa Fe Workshop class. This time it was Sunsets and Stars at Great Sand Dunes National Park & Preserve: Capture to Print, taught by Glenn Randall. We met for supper at Calvillo’s Mexican Restaurant in Alamosa, Colorado. I highly recommend the food and Alamosa is the closest town to the park that has good lodging.
The dune field has the tallest dunes in North America. The dunes spread across 30 square miles. The park features a unique high-altitude desert environment that can reach as high as 150 degrees F in summer and drop to minus 20 degrees F on winter nights.
This was not our first attempt at #nightphotography or #astrophotography. However, it was our first successful #astrophotography trip. As the title states, Sunsets and Stars, we set up before sunrise, before sunset, and late at night to photography the Milky Way, galaxy core.
Sunsets and Stars at Great Sand Dunes National Park & Preserve unique geology was created by:
Through the breaking apart and movement (rifting) of large surface plates on Earth’s surface, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains were uplifted in the rotation of a large plate. Fossils from the bottom of an ancient sea are now preserved in high layers of rock in the Sangre de Cristos. The San Juan Mountains were created through extended and dramatic volcanic activity. With these two mountain ranges in place, the San Luis Valley was born, covering an area roughly the size of the state of Connecticut.
Sediments from both mountain ranges filled the deep chasm of the valley, along with huge amounts of water from melting glaciers and rain. The presence of larger rocks along Medano Creek at the base of the dunes, elsewhere on the valley floor, and in buried deposits indicates that some of the sediment has been washed down in torrential flash-flood events.
https://www.nps.gov/grsa/learn/nature/sanddunes.htm
