I have visited Bryce Canyon National Park several times and while I marveled at its awesome craziness I never came away with many good images: wrong time of day; for some dumb reason in a hurry, but mainly bad weather was the problem. Trying to get a glimpse of the night sky at Bryce Canyon was the goal!

On this most recent trip we arrived at the park in the late afternoon, and drove to several pullouts along the rim. The view below was stunning, a white icing of snow crusted atop the hoodoos, but as we watched the clouds rolled in, obscuring the view.

Back at the hotel I watched through my window as a snow blizzard whipped through, scouring the high plains, an almost complete white-out, the wind blowing the snow horizontally.

Things did not look good…

As usual I awoke at 5am and looked out the window to see the sky. Were there stars? But the lights in the parking lot were too bright outside. My phone told me it was clear…to get up and schlep out there???

My interest to see one of the brightest skies in the US motivated me, and so I layered up and headed to the rim.

This image is a panorama of three images, using photomerge in Photoshop CS6. The editing afterwards was simple, mostly brightening the foreground. The sky was so bright, I have never seen so many stars.