NASA Pod Under the Milky Way

Big Bend Region, Texas

There are nights in Big Bend when the sky takes over completely (most nights actually). 

The mountains go quiet. The desert floor settles into shadow. And then the Milky Way lifts itself off the horizon and stretches across the basin like something alive.

This object, which we’ve come to call the NASA Pod for obvious reasons, sits abandoned in that vastness. It’s nothing more than a cement mixer left behind in a remote corner of the desert. But under a rising galaxy, with the right light and perspective, it stops feeling like equipment and starts feeling like a capsule, a fragment of human ambition dropped into a landscape that doesn’t care about it.

I turned the composition toward the direction of the galactic core on this night. The goal was simple: let the stars dominate. Let the desert be secondary. Let this strange, industrial relic sit in the foreground.

There’s a tension here I’m drawn to. Concrete and steel in the Chihuahuan Desert. A manufactured object resting beneath a sky that has been burning for billions of years in an area very void of human presence. 

Context and Landscape

The Big Bend region of West Texas lies within the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, one of the most biologically diverse deserts in North America. Elevation changes dramatically across the region, from low desert basins to volcanic peaks within the Chisos Mountains. Ancient lava flows, uplifted sedimentary rock, and eroded limestone formations shape a terrain that feels raw and exposed.

Its remoteness is part of its identity. Communities are sparse. Roads are long. Artificial light is minimal. Because of this, the area has been recognized for its exceptional night skies, with some of the lowest levels of light pollution in the continental United States. On clear, moonless nights, the Milky Way rises with remarkable clarity, revealing structure and color that remain invisible in most populated regions.

Human traces here are scattered and often temporary. Old ranch infrastructure, mining remnants, and abandoned equipment slowly weather into the desert. The land absorbs everything over time. Steel rusts. Concrete fractures. Paint fades beneath relentless sun and wind.

What remains constant is the sky and amazing desert we've come to love. 

Creation Notes

This image was captured using a medium format camera to preserve as much resolution and tonal depth as possible for large-scale printing.

The foreground was created using a focus stack to maintain sharpness from the immediate edge of the capsule through the distant mountains. Multiple frames were blended to overcome depth-of-field limitations inherent in night photography.

The green glow inside the capsule was achieved through controlled light painting using star pointer lasers across several exposures. Each pass was intentional, building the illumination gradually to avoid harsh hotspots and to maintain texture within the concrete interior.

After the foreground was completed, multiple exposures of the Milky Way were captured and stacked. This process reduces noise and enhances depth and color while remaining faithful to the actual structure of the sky at that moment. No artificial elements were added. The galaxy appears exactly where it rose above the horizon that night.