Tucson, Arizona.

Last year, we visited Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in extreme southern Arizona. Our next stop would be Tucson and the Saguaro National Park there. Traveling along State Route 86, the Tucson, Ajo Highway, we noticed signs referencing Kitt Peak and the Kitt Peak Observatory. From the highway, I captured an image of the observatory.

There’s good news and bad news about the observatory as I am writing this post in early May 2022. The observatory is still closed to visitors due to covid mitigation, however, the good news is that many of the things to see there can be seen online via their remote imaging and online astrophotography workshop programs. From their website here, you can see the night sky over Kitt Peak. By the time you read this, the observatory may be again open to visitors. Use the link above to see the observatory’s current status before planning your trip.

About the photo: Captured with my Samsung S20U, this image was 108 Megapixels (12000×9000 pixels). I was able to crop the photo extensively to get a better view for you of the observatory. As the photograph’s metadata includes the geographic coordinates of the camera’s position, I was able to locate the photo’s exact origination point in Google Maps. The distance measuring tool told me that the camera was 3.52 miles (5.67 km) from the point on the map identifying the observatory. After downloading, I tweaked the image in Lightroom Classic and moved it to Luminar Neo for a final touchup. Click on the image above to pixel peep in 2K HD on my Flickr site.

Note: If you’ve been waiting for Luminar Neo to be finished, Skylum has released version 1.1.0. It contains all of the features that were promised in its pre-release advertisements. As we are on the road again, in Albuquerque for a few days, I haven’t had a chance to download the new version yet, but I’ve seen several online videos showing the latest features.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone or even a dashcam, that’s acceptable as well. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment.

John Steiner