The Milky Way appears over the Chapel on the Rock near Allenspark.
William Knoll & Tim Kathka

We live on a giant hunk of rock floating through outer space. While we all know this is true, it can be difficult to make the concept feel real. It feels plenty real, however, when we venture into the dark night, far from city lights. There, gazing up at a pitch-black sky bejeweled with uncountable twinkling stars, it is easy to believe we are part of a vast galaxy of 100 billion stars – itself one of billions or even trillions of galaxies in the universe.

And when it gets dark enough, we can see the very galaxy we call home, the Milky Way, which appears as a luminous cloud streaking across the night sky. This cloud is actually made up of stars too faint to see individually. The galaxy is shaped like a spiraling disc, and because our solar system is part of it, we view the disc from the edge, making it look like a relatively straight line.

We can best see the Milky Way in Colorado from April through October. Whenever there’s no moon during those months, one can safely assume Tim Kathka and Bill Knoll will be out in the middle of the night photographing the Milky Way. Their nocturnal photo expeditions have taken them across the state, from the Great Sand Dunes, to ghost towns, to Rocky Mountain National Park. Kathka and Knoll don’t just photograph the Milky Way – they photograph it in context with Colorado landscapes.

“We’re always trying to get some interesting foreground into the picture,” Kathka said. “Otherwise, it’s just another picture of the sky.”

One of their favorite spots to capture the Milky Way is near Allenspark at St. Catherine of Siena Chapel at Camp St. Malo, better known as the Chapel on the Rock. The pair has photographed here a half dozen times, with the Milky Way rising from different parts of the horizon depending on the time of year.


Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve is an excellent dark-sky site.
Glenn Randall

Knoll’s four-wheel-drive truck allows them to get to some very remote places with exceptionally dark skies that allow the Milky Way to come into clearer focus. At the 19th century Saints John Mine near Montezuma, they drove up in the light of day to scout out the terrain, then went back at 1 a.m. to photograph the Milky Way with the mine’s abandoned silver mill.

The key to getting the best Milky Way shots is to leave the camera’s shutter open for a long exposure to capture as much starlight as possible.

“When you take a camera out and record the sky for 10 to 15 seconds, you see the individual stars with much greater detail than you see with your naked eye,” Kathka said.

Leave the shutter open for longer 15 seconds, he said, and Earth’s rotation will start turning the stars into streaky lines on the final image. Because the exposures are so long, it is essential to use a tripod and a remote shutter release cable to avoid shaking the camera. Any decent digital camera should be able to photograph the Milky Way – it can even be done with some of the newer iPhone models.

But all the camera equipment in the world won’t help if the sky is overcast or filled with light pollution. When determining where to go on their next photo shoot, Kathka and Knoll watch the weather forecast and consult the website cleardarksky.com, which gives predictions of how clear and dark the sky will be in a given location in the days ahead.

Though some might wonder if the pair of astronomical photographers would tire of shooting the same subject over and over, Knoll says that isn’t the case at all: The Colorado scenery below the Milky Way is always different, and the galaxy itself always appears in a different place in the sky. “It’s interesting and intriguing,” Knoll said, “to see what we’re going to see next time.”

And the sense of wonder one gets looking at the night sky while visiting some of the most beautiful places in Colorado is enough to keep anyone hooked.



The Milky Way arcs over the volcanic ash of Wheeler Geologic Area near Creede.
Jason Hatfield