Mile High Photographer

Call Website Contact the business

Mile High Photographer Full service photographer located in Rockwall, Texas. Portraits, weddings, senior photos and more.

```Lead, Follow, or Get the Hell Out of the Way 🌌 | B33, the Horsehead & Flame Nebulae in HOO📍 Rockwall County, TXOrion'...
10/17/2026

```
Lead, Follow, or Get the Hell Out of the Way 🌌 | B33, the Horsehead & Flame Nebulae in HOO
📍 Rockwall County, TX

Orion's belt anchors one of the most recognizable silhouettes in the sky. The Horsehead, Barnard 33, is a column of cold dust and gas about 1,400 light-years out, standing in front of IC 434, a wall of hydrogen ionized by Sigma Orionis, the bright multiple star at the top of the frame. The striations running up through the red glow are that ionized gas streaming off the cloud's surface. Radiation is stripping the Horsehead from the edges inward, and in a few million years the head will be gone. To the left, the Flame Nebula, NGC 2024, burns beside Alnitak, lit from within by a young cluster buried behind its own dark dust lanes.

Rendered in HOO: hydrogen-alpha mapped to red, doubly ionized oxygen to green and blue. The Flame was pushed toward gold to set it apart from the hydrogen wall.

This one is for the RED HORSE squadrons, the Air Force's Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineers, and for the four years I spent with the 820th. Since 1965, RED HORSE has gone into austere and hostile ground and built what the mission demanded: runways, bed-down sites, the heavy infrastructure that keeps air power in the fight. That dark head standing out against a wall of red put me right back in my time with the HORSE. Can Do. Will Do. Have Done.

Equipment
🔭 ZWO FF80
📷 Poseidon-M
🧭 Sky-Watcher Wave 150i
🎯 Guiding: PHD2 · OAG + ZWO ASI120MM Mini

Acquisition
Hα: 25 × 300s (2h 5m)
OIII: 20 × 300s (1h 40m)
Total integration: 3h 45m
Gain 125 · Offset 10

Processing
SyQon Studio — stacking, neural engines, stretch, tone, color and composition, soup to nuts

🗓️ October 16–17, 2026
```

```M45 🌌 | The Pleiades in LRGB📍 Caprock Canyons State Park, TXTa**us carries the Pleiades, a young open cluster about 4...
10/13/2026

```
M45 🌌 | The Pleiades in LRGB
📍 Caprock Canyons State Park, TX

Ta**us carries the Pleiades, a young open cluster about 440 light-years out and roughly 100 million years old. The blue haze wrapped around its brightest stars isn't the cloud they formed from. The cluster is drifting through an unrelated field of interstellar dust, and that dust scatters the stars' blue light far more efficiently than red. The brightest patch, the Merope Nebula, sits just off its star, and the long striations cutting through the glow trace the dust's structure as the cluster plows through it.

Shot in LRGB for natural color under a moonless sky on the canyon rim. A hard wind ran all night and cut usable data to just over an hour, but the faint cirrus surrounding the cluster still came through.

Equipment
🔭 ZWO FF80 APO
📷 Poseidon-M
🎛️ Askar LRGB filters
🧭 Sky-Watcher Wave 150i
🎯 Guiding: PHD2 · OAG + ZWO ASI120MM

Acquisition
L: 20 × 60s (20m)
R: 15 × 60s (15m)
G: 15 × 60s (15m)
B: 15 × 60s (15m)
Total integration: 1h 5m
Gain 125 · Offset 10

Processing
SyQon Studio — stacking, neural engines, stretch, tone, color and composition, soup to nuts

🗓️ October 11–12, 2026
```

IC 1848 🌌 | The Soul Nebula (Sh2-199) in SHO📍 Amargosa Valley, NVCassiopeia holds the Soul Nebula, a star-forming comple...
10/12/2026

IC 1848 🌌 | The Soul Nebula (Sh2-199) in SHO
📍 Amargosa Valley, NV

Cassiopeia holds the Soul Nebula, a star-forming complex about 7,500 light-years out, hollowed into two vast cavities by the young clusters at their centers. Radiation from those hot, massive stars ionizes the surrounding hydrogen and drives the cloud outward, piling gas into bright ridges along the cavity walls. The dark pillars along the inner rims are the densest knots still holding out against that radiation, pointing back toward the stars that are eroding them.

Rendered in a custom SHO mapping: gold and blue versions processed separately from the same data, then blended in Photoshop so the blue sits inside the hydrogen structure instead of floating on top of it.

Equipment
🔭 FRA300
📷 Uranus-M
🧭 Astro Frog FG-17
🎯 Guiding: PHD2 · Uniguide 50mm + Sedna-M

Acquisition
Hα: 20 × 300s (1h 40m)
OIII: 20 × 300s (1h 40m)
SII: 20 × 300s (1h 40m)
Total integration: 5h

Processing
SyQon Studio (Axiom V3, Parallax, Prism Deep, Continuum Stretch), Adobe Camera Raw, Photoshop

🗓️ October 8–9, 2026
```

🦞 Lobster Claw Nebula🌍 Nevada, USASh2-157, in Cassiopeia, roughly 11,000 light-years out. The claw is a ragged arc of hy...
10/09/2026

🦞 Lobster Claw Nebula

🌍 Nevada, USA

Sh2-157, in Cassiopeia, roughly 11,000 light-years out. The claw is a ragged arc of hydrogen, sulfur and oxygen, ionized by the young, hot stars of the Markarian 50 and NGC 7510 clusters and by the Wolf-Rayet star WR 157 in its northern reach. The blue running through the center is oxygen, sitting where the radiation is hardest. The gold is hydrogen and sulfur spreading out from it, and the dark lanes are cold dust that hasn't been lit up. From a Texas backyard, this is a gray smudge you have to talk yourself into. From the Nevada desert, with no glow on any horizon, it shows its full shape: arc, cavity and the faint gas trailing off the edges.

EXIF:
- Camera: Player One Poseidon-M Pro
- Lens: ZWO FF80
- Focal Length: 600mm
- Aperture: f/7.5
- Shutter: 300s subs, SII/Ha/OIII (69 subs, 5h45m total)
- Gain: 125
- Category: Tracked and Stacked
- Processing: Siril, SyQon Studio, Photoshop
- Date Taken: October 2026

❤️ Heart Nebula🌍 Rockwall, Texas & Arizona, USAIC 1805, in Cassiopeia, roughly 7,500 light-years out. At its center sits...
10/08/2026

❤️ Heart Nebula

🌍 Rockwall, Texas & Arizona, USA

IC 1805, in Cassiopeia, roughly 7,500 light-years out. At its center sits Melotte 15, a young cluster of massive O-type stars whose ultraviolet radiation ionizes the surrounding hydrogen, sulfur and oxygen and clears out the cavity that gives the nebula its shape. The dark columns reaching in toward the cluster are denser gas and dust that has held out against that erosion longer than everything around it. The Fish Head Nebula, IC 1795, sits at the bottom of the frame. Two-panel mosaic, SHO palette.

EXIF:
- Camera: Player One Uranus-M Pro
- Lens: Askar FRA300 Pro
- Focal Length: 300mm
- Aperture: f/5
- Shutter: 300s subs, SII/Ha/OIII (85 subs, ~7h total)
- Gain: 210 (HCG)
- Category: Tracked and Stacked, 2-Panel Mosaic
- Processing: Siril, Naz's mosaic script, SyQon Studio, Photoshop
- Date Taken: September–October 2026

🌌 Hoodoos🌎 Garfield County, Utah, USAMore than two hundred nights a year, water in these cracks freezes, and by afternoo...
10/07/2026

🌌 Hoodoos
🌎 Garfield County, Utah, USA

More than two hundred nights a year, water in these cracks freezes, and by afternoon it melts. That's what built the hoodoos: ice prying the limestone apart, grain by grain.

Above them, the core of the Milky Way.

The rim loses a foot or more a century. That light took twenty-six thousand years to get here. I gave it two minutes.

EXIF:

- Foreground
- Camera: A7RV
- Lens: Sony 24-70mm f/2.8 GM II
- Focal Length: 25mm
- Aperture: f/4
- Shutter: 120s
- ISO: 400
- Sky
- Camera: A7RV (APS-C mode)
- Lens: Sony 24mm f/1.4 GM
- Focal Length: 24mm (36mm equivalent)
- Aperture: f/1.6
- Shutter: 90s
- ISO: 320
- Category: Blend, 5-frame tracked panorama sky with single-shot foreground

NGC 7822 🌌 | Cederblad 214 & Sh2-171 in SHO📍 Backyard, Rockwall, TXCepheus holds one of the most sculpted star-forming r...
10/06/2026

NGC 7822 🌌 | Cederblad 214 & Sh2-171 in SHO
📍 Backyard, Rockwall, TX

Cepheus holds one of the most sculpted star-forming regions in the northern sky. NGC 7822 is a complex about 3,000 light-years out, carved from within by the young cluster Berkeley 59. UV radiation from those hot, newborn stars ionizes the surrounding hydrogen and erodes the cloud into the dark pillars and dust lanes cutting through the core. On the left, the long ridge of NGC 7822 proper runs the full height of the frame. On the right, Cederblad 214 packs dense columns of gas into the brightest part of the complex, still collapsing into the next generation of stars.

Rendered in the Hubble palette: sulfur mapped to red, hydrogen to green, oxygen to blue. The gold traces where hydrogen and sulfur dominate the outer shells. The blue marks doubly ionized oxygen concentrated in the hottest, most energetic zone near the cluster, where the radiation is strongest.

Equipment
🔭 FF80
📷 Poseidon-M
🧭 Astro Frog FG-17
🎯 Guiding: PHD2

Acquisition
Hα: 21 × 300s (1h 45m)
OIII: 18 × 300s (1h 30m)
SII: 24 × 300s (2h)
Total integration: 5h 15m

Processing
Siril (stacking), SyQon Studio (Parallax, Prism Deep, Axiom V3), Adobe Camera Raw, Photoshop

🗓️ October 5–6, 2026

🪨 Shiprock🌎 San Juan County, New Mexico, USAStand out on the flat at sundown and the scale is hard to hold. Sixteen hund...
10/05/2026

🪨 Shiprock
🌎 San Juan County, New Mexico, USA

Stand out on the flat at sundown and the scale is hard to hold. Sixteen hundred feet of dark stone, alone on a plain that runs to the horizon. The sky behind it goes the color of the magma that made it, then fades, and the rock goes black.

Nearly thirty million years ago, this was the throat of a volcano, buried half a mile deep. The mountain is gone, worn down grain by grain. The ridge on the left is one of its old fissures, still running out across the desert. What's left is the part that wouldn't erode.

EXIF:

- Camera: A7RV
- Lens: Sony 24-70mm f/2.8 GM II
- Focal Length: 32mm
- Aperture: f/16
- Shutter: 1/60s
- ISO: 320
- Category: Single Shot
- Date Taken: August 9, 2026

🏜️ Horseshoe Bend🌎 Coconino County, Arizona, USAWalk to the edge here and the ground just stops. A thousand feet of air ...
10/04/2026

🏜️ Horseshoe Bend
🌎 Coconino County, Arizona, USA

Walk to the edge here and the ground just stops. A thousand feet of air between your boots and the Colorado. Your stomach drops before your eyes finish the math.

The walls are Navajo Sandstone: dunes from a desert that ran across the West nearly two hundred million years ago, buried, packed, and turned to stone. The river was already running this loop when the plateau began to rise. It held the curve and has been cutting straight down for five million years.

My part took a twentieth of a second.

EXIF:

- Camera: A7RV
- Lens: Laowa 10mm f/2.8
- Focal Length: 10mm
- Aperture: f/11
- Shutter: 1/20s
- ISO: 320
- Category: Single Shot

Pensacola is home for the Blue Angels. Since 1946 the Navy has picked its best aviators, painted their jets blue and gol...
10/04/2026

Pensacola is home for the Blue Angels. Since 1946 the Navy has picked its best aviators, painted their jets blue and gold, and sent them up to show the world what a fighter does in disciplined hands. Four Super Hornets in echelon, smoke on, wingtips close enough that one sloppy input ends it. They fly it show after show and make it look like nothing. No team on earth flies better.

Air Force beat Navy 14-9 today, and twenty years in Air Force blue says I get to enjoy that. But over Pensacola, the Navy owns the sky. I'll concede that much.

EXIF:

• Camera: A9III
• Lens: FE 200-600mm F5.6-6.3 G OSS + 1.4X Teleconverter
• Focal Length: 280mm
• Aperture: f/8
• Shutter: 1/2500s
• ISO: 400
• Category: Single Shot
• Date Taken: August 26, 2026

Address

Rockwall, TX

Telephone

+14177704019

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Mile High Photographer posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Mile High Photographer:

Shortcuts

Share

Category