My Love for Astrophotography

Chasing the Dark: Astrophotography in Humboldt County and Iceland

**The Night Sky Changes Everything**

There is a moment that happens — if you've ever stood beneath a truly dark sky — where your eyes adjust, the stars multiply, and the universe stops feeling abstract. It becomes something you can reach up and touch. The Milky Way stretches from horizon to horizon, not as a faint smudge but as a river of light so dense and detailed it almost doesn't seem real. That moment is why I do this work.

Astrophotography has become one of the most meaningful and challenging parts of my practice as a photographer. It demands patience, planning, and a genuine willingness to embrace discomfort — cold nights, long waits, settings that feel counterintuitive, and an outcome that is never fully guaranteed. But when it all comes together, the images you bring home are unlike anything you can make in the daytime world. They are proof that something extraordinary is happening above us every single night, whether we look up or not.

This post is about two places that have shaped my night sky work more than anywhere else: Humboldt County, California — my home — and Iceland, one of the most remarkable destinations on Earth for anyone chasing the aurora.

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**Humboldt County After Dark: A Hidden Astrophotography Paradise**

Most people know Humboldt for its ancient redwoods, its wild coastline, and its perpetual marine layer. What they don't always know is that once you get away from the lights of Eureka and Arcata, Humboldt County drops into some of the darkest skies in California. The combination of low population density, minimal industrial development, and a rugged coastline with nothing but open ocean to the west creates night sky conditions that rival much more remote destinations.

The coast is where I've done much of my most rewarding astrophotography work, and for good reason. There is something about placing the Milky Way or the aurora over the Pacific Ocean that amplifies both — the vastness of the sky above mirrored by the vastness of the water below.

**Moonstone Beach and Luffenholtz Beach** near Trinidad have become two of my most-visited night locations. At Moonstone, the smooth stones and dark volcanic sand create a foreground that catches reflected starlight beautifully on long exposures. Luffenholtz sits on a rocky, elevated shelf that lets you shoot out over the surf, the sea stacks emerging from the dark water like ancient sentinels. When the Milky Way rises over the Pacific and its core aligns with the horizon just right, there is nothing in the daytime world that compares to that view.

**Tepona Point** is another location that has delivered some of my favorite images. The geometry of the coastline here — the way the headland juts into the sea and the rocks stack up against the surf — gives you natural foreground structure that photographs beautifully under a star-filled sky. On the night I captured the aurora from Tepona Point, the pink light from the geomagnetic storm washed over the entire scene in a way I genuinely did not expect to see from Northern California. It stopped me in my tracks.

**Camel Rock**, just north of Trinidad, made for an extraordinary foreground when Comet A3 passed through in October 2024. The rock's distinctive silhouette against the dark sky, with the comet trailing above and the Milky Way arching in the background, is one of those compositions I will not forget making. Comets are rare enough that when one is bright enough to photograph with standard equipment, you don't sleep — you drive to the coast and you set up your tripod.

**Tips for Night Sky Photography in Humboldt**

- **Escape the light domes.** Even modest urban glow from Eureka can wash out the fainter stars. Drive north to the Trinidad area or south toward Petrolia and the Lost Coast for your darkest skies.

- **Check the moon phase before you go.** A full moon will light up the landscape beautifully but will overpower the Milky Way. For star-dense exposures, plan around the new moon window.

- **Use the landscape.** Humboldt's sea stacks, coastal rocks, covered bridges, and old barns are tailor-made for night sky foregrounds. Don't just point at the sky — anchor your image in something that tells a story about this place.

- **Dress for winter even in summer.** The Humboldt coast at 2 a.m. is cold, damp, and frequently windy regardless of what month it is. Bring layers you won't regret.

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**The Aurora Over Humboldt: Something I Never Expected to See at Home**

Let me be honest about something. When I first started hearing reports of aurora borealis visible from Northern California, I was skeptical. The northern lights are supposed to require a plane ticket — to Alaska, to Scandinavia, to somewhere far above the 50th parallel. Humboldt County sits at roughly 41 degrees north latitude. That's not aurora country. Except, it turns out, sometimes it is.

During periods of heightened solar activity, particularly in 2024 when the sun approached the peak of its 11-year cycle, geomagnetic storms powerful enough to push the aurora visible zone deep into the lower 48 became increasingly common. And when those storms hit on a clear night in Humboldt County, the sky did things I still struggle to describe.

The aurora I photographed from **Moonstone Beach** and **Tepona Point** in May 2024 was not the faint, barely-visible shimmer that sometimes shows up in longer exposures. The pink and green light was visible to the naked eye. It reflected off the ocean. It arched across the sky above the surf. I stood there with my camera on a tripod and just watched for a while before I remembered to actually take pictures.

What strikes me most about aurora photography in this context — shooting it not from a remote Arctic field but from a coastline I know intimately, a beach I've walked a hundred times in daylight — is the strange doubling of familiarity and wonder. You are in a place you know, and it becomes a place you've never seen before.

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**Iceland: Where the Aurora Comes to You**

If Humboldt is where I discovered that the aurora could find me at home, Iceland is where I went to meet it on its own terms.

Iceland sits just south of the Arctic Circle, and its geography is almost designed for photographers. Volcanic landscapes, geothermal pools, black sand beaches, cascading waterfalls, and glaciers — all of it under skies that, when the clouds cooperate, blaze with the northern lights for weeks at a time in winter. There is no other place I have been where the foreground and the sky compete so equally for your attention.

The aurora in Iceland behaves differently than what I photographed from California. In Humboldt, I was capturing extraordinary exceptions — events powerful enough to reach unusual latitudes. In Iceland, the aurora is a nightly possibility, something you build your schedule around and check forecasts for the way you might check the tide chart at home. KP index apps become your most consulted tool. You learn to read the difference between a promising forecast and a guaranty, and you learn to accept that clouds are Iceland's most common photographic obstacle.

What Iceland gave me, more than any single image, was an understanding of the aurora as a living thing. It moves. It pulses. It shifts from a greenish arc sitting quietly on the northern horizon to a full-sky display of curtains and ribbons in the span of minutes. Photographing it requires a different mindset than landscape work during the day — you can't pre-visualize the composition fully because the sky keeps rewriting it. You learn to react, to anticipate, and to trust your settings enough to let the scene unfold without second-guessing every frame.

The combination of Icelandic volcanic terrain — lava fields, black sand, glacial ice — with the aurora overhead creates images that feel almost fictitious. When you look at them later on a screen, it's hard to fully accept that no compositing was involved, that the sky really did look that way, that this is what photography can do when the natural world decides to cooperate in spectacular fashion.

**Tips for Shooting the Aurora in Iceland**

- **Go in winter.** The aurora requires darkness, and Iceland in summer has nearly continuous daylight. November through February gives you the longest dark windows and the best aurora odds.

- **Get away from Reykjavík.** The capital has enough light pollution to dim the show significantly. An hour's drive in almost any direction opens up dramatically darker and more dramatic skies.

- **Shoot in RAW, and push your ISO.** Aurora photography is a high-ISO game. Don't be afraid of ISO 3200 or 6400 — modern sensors handle it well, and the alternative is underexposed frames that miss the moment.

- **Have a composition in mind before dark.** Scout your location in daylight. Know where the interesting foreground elements are, where north is, and how you want to frame the sky. When the aurora fires up, you won't have time to figure this out from scratch.

- **Be ready to wait — and ready to move fast.** Some nights, the aurora appears at 11 p.m. Some nights, it erupts at 2 a.m. and lasts eight minutes. Patience is the single most important piece of gear you bring.

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**Two Places, One Pursuit**

Humboldt County and Iceland could not feel more different as shooting environments. One is home — familiar coastline, known roads, the same sea stacks I've photographed in daylight a hundred times. The other is a foreign landscape of volcanic fire and glacial ice, where even the light from the sky feels alien. But astrophotography connects them completely.

In both places, the work requires the same things: darkness, planning, physical readiness, and a willingness to stand outside in the cold and be genuinely astonished by what the universe is doing above your head. That's the part I hope comes through in the images — not just technical execution, but the sense that I was there, that this was real, that the sky actually looked like this.

All of my aurora and Milky Way prints from Humboldt County and Iceland are available in my astrophotography gallery. These images are printed on archival materials and look extraordinary large — the detail in the Milky Way's core, the gradient of color in the aurora, the texture of the foreground landscape all reward a big print on a wall. If you've ever looked up at a dark sky and felt that pull, I hope one of these images brings that feeling into your home.

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**A Final Word**

The night sky is not a backdrop. It is not a filter effect or a lucky exposure. It is the universe — real and unimaginably vast — and it is available to anyone willing to stand in the dark and look up.

You don't have to go to Iceland to see something remarkable. Sometimes it comes to you, in pink waves across a California beach, on a Tuesday night in May, when the sun decides to remind us that we live inside a solar system and that solar systems are not quiet places.

But if you ever do get the chance to stand in a lava field in Iceland with the aurora burning overhead — go. Take every memory card you own.

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*Browse my full astrophotography collection at jeffreyschwartzphotography.com/astrophotography