Parks and Nights 2020: Fee-Free Days, Supermoons, Meteor Showers and More

It's 2020! A new year with new opportunities to photograph national parks and night skies.

The next 12 months will be full of events and happenings that should appeal to anyone reading, so below we offer a list of some items to be on the lookout for.

Fee-Free Days

Most national parks charge a fee for entering. You can always pay at an entry station, but my preference is to buy an annual pass, which for only $80 (or less, or free, in some cases) gets you into all the National Park Service units, plus national wildlife refuges, national forests and so on—in total, over 2,000 federal recreation areas. Not a bad deal.

The parks are worth any price. Still, free is always nice, and there are five days in 2020 when the park service offers Fee-Free Days to all visitors:

• January 20: Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.

• April 18: First day of National Park Week

• August 25: National Park Service Birthday

• September 26: National Public Lands Day

• November 11: Veterans Day

Night Sky Festivals

Each year we publish a rundown of the night sky festivals offered by and in our national parks. (Stay tuned for that in the spring, when enough plans have been announced for us to be more comprehensive than we could be right now.) These festivals feature the darkest of dark skies, telescope setups, astronomy talks, photo walks and more.

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The national park star parties (such as the one at Grand Canyon, above) are full of opportunities for viewing and photographing night skies. © 2019 Chris Nicholson.

Two of the biggest festivals are at Grand Canyon (where Gabe and I delivered a presentation and ran programs last year) and Acadia national parks. But there are scores of others, including Badlands, Bryce Canyon, Lassen Volcanic, Shenandoah and so on.

Another biggie is one we don’t mention often because it always happens before we publish our annual list, and it’s about to commence: the Death Valley Dark Sky Festival. It runs this year from February 21-23. I was able to visit this festival during a workshop in the park last year—it’s an incredibly dynamic event under some of the very best night skies in the U.S.

Workshops

Of course, we’d be remiss not to mention that a new year is a great time to learn new photography skills, and a great way to do that is on a workshop. The benefits of attending a photography workshop or tour include not just hands-on assistance and expert location knowledge, but also camaraderie and the security of a group adventure.

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Our workshop group at the beginning of a night shoot in Dry Tortugas National Park in 2017. © 2017 Gabriel Biderman.

Of course we’d love if you attend one of ours workshops, but there are countless other programs that run excellent events as well. If there’s a particular place you want to photograph or a particular skill you want learn, there’s likely a workshop for that.

We have seats left for a few of our 2020 workshops and tours:

• May 16-23: Scotland—The Orkney Islands

• June 6-12: Shenandoah National Park

• July 19-24: Maine—Monhegan and Acadia

• October 29-November 3: Catskill Night Portraiture

• November 15-20: Barcelona

Beyond that, Google is your friend. Find an experience that speaks to you, and go!

Supermoons

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Craterlicious moon, Biscayne National Park. Nikon D500 with a Nikkor 800mm f/5.6. 1/1000, f/11, ISO 1000. © 2018 Gabriel Biderman.

The astronomy world doesn’t have an official definition of what constitutes a supermoon, so sometimes some astronomers proclaim a moon super when others don’t. Such is the case this year, when some are designating only two. But Fred Espenak (who EarthSky dubs “the go-to astronomer on all things related to lunar and solar eclipses”) is classifying four full moons this year as super:

• February 9

• March 9

• April 8

• May 7

So on those nights you can figure the moon will be a little bigger and a little brighter. (For a couple of ideas on what to do with that, see Tim’s blog post “Light Painting in Moonlight—Using the Moon as Key Light, or Using it as Fill.”)

By the way, this won’t be super, but it could be fun: There’s a blue moon on Halloween this year. Just sayin’.

Falling Stars and Such

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Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado. Nikon D750, 15mm Zeiss Distagon f/2.8 lens. 234 images at 22 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400, plus a single exposure at 382 seconds, ISO 2000 for the landscape after moonrise. © 2017 Matt Hill.

The night sky is full of things besides the moon, and some of them fall. Below is a list of 2020 meteor showers. They’re listed by the date of peak activity, so you should be able to see meteors for several days before and after:

• April 22: Lyrid Meteor Shower (during new moon)

• May 6: Eta Aquarid Meteor Shower

• July 28: Delta Aquarid Meteor Shower

• August 12: Perseid Meteor Shower

• October 7: Draconid Meteor Shower

• October 21: Orionid Meteor Shower

• November 4: Taurid Meteor Shower

• November 17: Leonid Meteor Shower (during new moon)

• December 13: Geminid Meteor Shower (during new moon)

• December 21: Ursid Meteor Shower

This year will also feature two other notable astronomical events:

• February 18: occultation of moon and Mars

• June 21: annular solar eclipse (in Central Africa, Saudi Arabia, India and China)

• December 21: rare conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn

It’s also good to note the two solstices:

• June 22: June solstice (longest day of the year—very sad)

• December 21: December solstice (longest night of the year—yay!)

Also, the equinoxes fall on March 20 and September 22, but we’re ambivalent about those.

Wrapping Up

So there you go—a whole bunch of opportunities to get out and seize the night in 2020. Which ones are on your radar? Share in the comments section below, or in the comments on our Facebook page.

Chris Nicholson is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night, and author of Photographing National Parks (Sidelight Books, 2015). Learn more about national parks as photography destinations, subscribe to Chris' free e-newsletter, and more at www.PhotographingNationalParks.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Oreos and More: 16 Ways to Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

— Neil Armstrong

It’s here. The Big 5-0. Fifty years since a person first touched a world beyond our home.

I don’t remember this happening. I was still a year and a half from—as my grandfather would say—being even a twinkle in my parents’ eyes. I wouldn’t be born until the latter half of 1971, and I’d grow up in a world where humankind had already made a giant leap toward the stars.

Yet here I am, in 2019, marveling that this ever happened and celebrating that it did.

How am I celebrating? Well, mostly by conversing with my 6-year-old daughter about it. Last night we talked about Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, and we looked at pictures of the lander and the rover and the rigid U.S. flag.

And now I remember that “moon” was one of her first words, and how she would delight at seeing it in the night skies of Astoria, Queens, where she lived her first few years, and how when she was 3 she would love to say, “Look, the moon is a crescent, like a croissant!” And how she, even more than me, will grow up thinking that not walking on the moon is just a faint remnant of history.

Before going to bed, she asked if she would ever get to walk on the moon too, and I said maybe. Then I changed my answer. “Yes,” I said, “if you want to walk on the moon, then I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

She will—she’s that kind of kid—determined, unburdened by the nuisance of obstacles. Kind of like that trio of moonwalkers 50 years ago, and kind of like the thousands and thousands of scientists and technicians who helped lift them to the beyond.

Then she asked, “Daddy, can we do it together?”

Gosh, I hope so.

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16 Ways to Celebrate

Not many things are celebrated by a majority of the world at once. The moon landing was one of the few, and its semicentennial also will be recognized globally. You won’t be able to escape it on the news today—heck, you can’t even escape it on our blog.

If you can’t beat a party, then you might as well join one. What can you do to be festive today? Below are 16 ideas.

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1. Eat Some Oreos

Nabisco recently released limited edition Marshmallow Moon Oreo Cookies. Not only are they as yummy as the rest of the best Oreos, but the package glows in the dark! In stores now—if you can still find them.

(Might we also suggest Milky Way and Mars bars? Moon pies? Tang?)

2. Explain Dynamic Range

Moon-landing conspiracy theorists point to many pieces of evidence that a half-century ago NASA produced nothing more than a big show on a sound stage. One of their Exhibits A is that no stars appear in the sky in Buzz and Neil’s photographs from the surface. So for fun, go find a moon-landing denier and explain that the reason no stars appear is because film couldn’t handle the vastly different exposures of the bright surface of the moon and the darkness of space in one perfectly exposed frame. (Lunar module payload didn’t have space for split-ND filters. Duh.)

3. Watch the Movie

Whether on TV, or at a movie or IMAX theater, watch Apollo 11, the full-length documentary released earlier this year. It’s back in theaters this weekend, is streamable on multiple platforms (Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, et al.), and will be broadcast on CNN twice this evening.

4. Read About a Progmatic Woman

You may have seen this in 2015, but it’s worth a revisit. Check out Wired magazine’s profile of Margaret Hamilton, who, working in “a man’s field,” came to be instrumental in leading the development of the software that powered the Apollo missions. She was such a pioneer in coding that she even co-coined the term “software engineer.” See “Her Code Got Humans on the Moon—And Invented Software Itself.”

5. Shoot with Neil & Buzz

The New York Times put together an outstanding interactive digital walk-through of the moon landing, along with photographs the astronauts made both on the surface and on the flights to and fro. It’s hard to describe this experience—you’ll need to check it out yourself. See “Apollo 11: As They Shot It.”

“Neil, this is Houston. Did you get the Hasselblad magazine?

Roger, Houston. … We’re in the process of using up what film we have. We’ve probably got another half an hour’s worth of picture-taking.”

6. Relive the Landing in 3D

Go to your local bookstore and buy Mission Moon 3D: A New Perspective on the Space Race by David Eicher, editor of Astronomy Magazine. The book features stereoscopic versions of famous and lesser-known photographs of the 1960s space race, lending unique visual access to one of the greatest stories of the 20th century. 3D viewing glasses included.

7. Listen to Brian May

On January 1 of this year, the legendary Queen guitarist released a composition called “New Horizons.” The song is really a celebration of the titular NASA space probe that buzzed a Kuiper belt object, but we’re including it here because May, also an astrophysicist, designed the 3D viewer that comes with the book mentioned in the previous paragraph. Yes, really. Plus, the song could have easily been about flying to the moon for the first time, right?

8. Also Listen to Pink Floyd

Because now that I’m mentioning it, Dark Side of the Moon will be in your head. Also, it’s where Michael Collins spent half his time 50 years ago today, while he circled over his moonbound friends. (“There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.”)

9. Immerse Yourself in The Atlantic

If you’re not tired of reading (thank goodness, that means you’re still reading this post), then click over to the website for The Atlantic and peruse their 14-article series reflecting on the lunar landing, titled “They Went to the Moon.” Pieces include:

• “What Is the Apollo 11 Landing Site Like Now?”

• “Your Smart Toaster Can’t Hold a Candle to the Apollo Computer”

• “The Most Compelling Photo of the Moon Landing”

10. See What Neil Armstrong Saw

Using NAC images, moon topography, trajectory data and all sorts of other neat technology, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera folks created a video simulation of what Armstrong saw when the lunar lander was lunar-landing. Check it out on the Arizona State University website.

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11. Mail a Letter

Head to the post office (before noon—today’s Saturday!) to buy some First Moon Landing commemorative stamps, and use one to send a letter to somebody who’d like to receive a letter from you. Better yet, make it a postcard and tell them you’re vacationing on the shores of the Sea of Tranquility.

12. Watch a Monument Prepare for Liftoff

If you’re in Washington, D.C., head to the National Mall for the National Air and Space Museum’s “Apollo 50: Go for the Moon” show, which will culminate with an image of the mission’s full-scale, 363-foot Saturn V rocket projected on the Washington Monument.

13. Build Your Own Lunar Lander

Seriously! Lego lets you do it, and the job entails just 1,087 pieces. (If you count only 1,086, watch where you step with bare feet.) The NASA Apollo 11 Lunar Lander kit will set you back only $100. Think that’s a lot? NASA spent $240 million on each of theirs. Kit includes Lego Neil and Lego Buzz.

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14. Build Your Own Moon!

Four Point Puzzles produced a beautiful 1,000-piece, two-foot circular puzzle of the full moon based on the highest-resolution photo NASA has made to date. (We encourage Four Point to make an easier version based on a waning crescent.)

15. Attend an Event

The U.S. is celebrating the moon landing anniversary everywhere (except the moon, ironically). If you’re interested in learning more about this historic moment, or seeing if you can score some green cheese, look for an event near you. (Know that today is not your last chance—many of these programs run longer into the year.) NASA and Space.com are here to help, with a list of ongoing events and exhibits, from Houston to Cape Canaveral, from the mountains to the prairies, from sea to shining sea.

16. Finally, Photograph the Moon

Last, but absolutely not least, get outside with your camera tonight and photograph that big gray ball in the sky. Want some help? See our blog posts:

• Shooting for the Moon: How to Photograph Earth's Little Cousin

• Light Painting in Moonlight—Using the Moon as Key Light, or Using it as Fill

• Which Moon Phases are Best for Different Kinds of Night Photography?

Your Turn!

How will you be observing or celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first manned moon landing? Share in the Comments section below or on our Facebook page. We’re all in this together. Party on.

Chris Nicholson is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night, and author of Photographing National Parks (Sidelight Books, 2015). Learn more about national parks as photography destinations, subscribe to Chris' free e-newsletter, and more at www.PhotographingNationalParks.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

A Star Trek: Reporting Back from our Time at the Grand Canyon Night Sky Festival

One of the things I love about my job is that I get to experience so much of what our national parks offer. From soul-easing sunrises to serene night skies, from windswept desert landscapes to alpine lakes and streams—I get to see it all and reconnect with the natural beauty we were all born from eons ago.

In addition to all the wilderness it preserves, the institution of the National Park Service offers countless opportunities to engage with these places and to interact with others who enjoy them so passionately. One such opportunity is the Grand Canyon Star Party, the annual festival of night at one of the world’s most famous natural spaces. And last week, National Parks at Night was fortunate and proud to be a part of this stellar event.

A Grand Party

Many national parks organize night sky festivals, but the Grand Canyon puts on one of the biggest. The party lasts eight days—long enough for us to participate last weekend, come home, write a blog post, and share the news with you today while the event is still going on.

Photographing the Milky Way at Mather Point. © 2019 Gabriel Biderman.

Ten thousand night sky fans were expected to visit the park this week specifically for the festival, and scores more serendipitously joined the activities when they happened to find themselves in the right place at definitely the right time. Those folks enjoyed (and today are still enjoying):

• lectures about dark skies, astronomy and nocturnal activities

• more than 50 telescopes available for viewing planets and galaxies, arranged by the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association

• ranger-led constellation walks

• a general camaraderie among like-minded knights of the night

This year marked the 29th Star Party, and the biggest news of the event (no, it wasn’t that we were there) was this:

On the very first morning the International Dark Sky Association visited to certify the Grand Canyon as an International Dark Sky Park—the 70th and now the largest park of its kind in the world. It’s an honor that took three years for the park to earn, partly by converting over 5,000 lights to be dark-sky compliant—creating what Forbes Magazine recently dubbed “the $1 million Milky Way.” The retrofitting funds were raised by the Grand Canyon Conservancy, the park’s nonprofit partner.

Introducing: Night Photography!

What was our place in all of this? For two days Gabriel Biderman and I led education about—you guessed it!—night photography. According to the rangers we worked with, this is the first time the festival has offered a night photography component, and we were thrilled to lead the way.

The Grand Canyon Star Party is broken into two halves—one on the South Rim, one on the North. We were stationed at the former, working around the primary visitor center.

On our first night, we delivered a presentation titled “Night Photography in the National Parks.” The visitor center theater accommodates 233 people, and every chair was occupied. Moreover, we learned afterward that about 325 people were outside the theater watching the large-screen livestream of the talk—for a total of about 550 attendees! That fully reinforced how big an event we were part of. I can’t speak for Gabe, but I know it’s the largest audience I’ve ever spoken to. I’m not sure I could adequately describe how fulfilling it is to be able to share a passion with so many.

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Gabe and I posing with our in-house audience.

The talk centered around—well, the title says it all. We relayed some of the experiences of the Grand Canyon South Rim workshop that we had just wrapped up a few days before, showing images that we’d created of the canyon under moonlight, in addition to some behind-the-scenes pictures of our workshop attendees enjoying the night. And then we spent half an hour showing our photographs from 29 national parks—from Acadia and Arches to Yellowstone and Zion—sharing stories about the experience of being in these wonderful places at night.

When the talk was over, we signed some books in the back. We usually sell books on our own at events like this, but the Grand Canyon Conservancy asked if they could make the sales. We were more than happy to have them take over. They do great work, and we’re on board with any way we can support them. (If you have a love of, or an interest in, the Grand Canyon, check out what they do at the link above.)

© 2019 Cindy Radich.

Then we met with 60 photographers who were on hand for the free night-photo walk we were leading. Everyone gathered in the theater, where Gabe and I walked them through setting up their cameras for night photography. Then we all walked under the night sky to Mather Point, one of the most stunning vistas in the park and the best spot on the South Rim to view the Milky Way. Everyone was able to create some great images of our galactic core rising over the rim—many of them for the first time! The smiles were so big that we could see them even in the dark.

Day Work

The next day we were up early (well, early for us) so we could set up our table at the festival. The park was kind enough to station us right outside the main visitor center, in the heart of the goings-on. We spent the afternoon (a beautiful, sunny, cloudless, blue-sky day) meeting and greeting fellow photographers and night enthusiasts, talking about the Grand Canyon and other parks, sharing info about our workshop program, and giving out a lot of NPAN stickers to kids and kids-at-heart.

Photo © 2019 Jen Bookman.

Gabe and I with our hard-earned Junior Ranger Night Explorer patches.

(Funny story: We were stationed so much in the middle of the activity that people kept asking us for general information about the Star Party—what it was, where to be for events, and so on. We were happy to oblige. Late in the day a ranger noted how helpful we’d been, and he thereby awarded us Junior Ranger patches.)

On that second night we led another photo walk, exactly the same as the previous night’s, except this time about 70 photographers partook. Many of them were people we’d met and chatted with during the day—lots of new friends and smiling faces.

One notable difference between the first- and second-night groups was that more than several of the latter hadn’t come to the festival with the intent of photographing at night, and thus didn’t have tripods. Fortunately for us, Manfrotto has treated us well over the past couple of years, so we had a few extra tripods we could loan out—all from the Traveler series.

Even more than the previous night, people were walking away from Mather Point with the first Milky Way images they’d ever created. And some went even further. One attendee tried his very first Milky Way pano, a couple of more decided to venture into star trails for the first time, and the last photographer standing that night, by the time Gabe and I left, was well into his inaugural run at making a Milky Way time-lapse.

Winding Down

At the end of the two days, Gabe and I were simultaneously wiped out and reinvigorated. Neither of us had ever been involved with an event quite like this, and now we can hardly wait to be involved in one again. We could feel two communities coming together—introducing our night photography community to astronomers and avid stargazers, and likewise enjoying being embraced by them in return.

There are so, so many people who love to soothe their souls with sunrises, desert landscapes, and alpine lakes and streams—and who love to seize the night. And now we’re lucky to be friends with more of them.

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Notes

We owed, and conveyed, gratitude to several people for helping us make this happen. But three we’d like to mention here:

1. Thank you to Rader Lane, the ranger who brought us into the fold and served as our point person on-site. He also spent his morning off from work saving my laptop. Upon leaving the park I left my bag behind in the house. Rader retrieved it and ensured that it found its way to FedEx. If not for him, I wouldn’t have been able to write this post—in more ways than one.

2. Thank you to Jen Bookman and Cindy Radich, two of our Grand Canyon workshop attendees who stayed for the Star Party and shared their photos with us for this post. It was nice to have personal photographers on hand, and we always enjoy their company.

Chris Nicholson is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night, and author of Photographing National Parks (Sidelight Books, 2015). Learn more about national parks as photography destinations, subscribe to Chris' free e-newsletter, and more at www.PhotographingNationalParks.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT