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August 14, 2022 • 25 minutes ago • Read 9 minutes • Join the conversation The moon hangs in the sky over Milo, Ab., on Monday, August 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia
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There were a lot of bugs around.
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Ephemeral, mainly moths, a few water beetles. A mosquito or two. They were crawling through the windshield of the truck, hanging from the headboard, wandering around my arms, tangled in my hair. A couple of them lit up on the bright back screen of my camera.
Most of them, I ignored them. The ones on the camera, I pushed them away.
I set up my camp lantern on a picnic table by Lake McGregor next to Milo to add some light to the scene before me. It was getting close to 11:30 at night, and although the moon was bright and yellow, it wasn’t bright enough to illuminate the trees around me, so I took out my flashlight and turned it on.
With it tilted up towards the trees, I adjust the brightness so that I can more or less match the moonlight while still being able to see the stars in the sky above. It took me a few minutes to do this, but I finally got it where I wanted it and got ready to take some photos.
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The bugs came almost immediately.
When I left the city a few hours earlier, the day had been hot and windy, but as I headed east, it died down a bit. It was still shaking the wheat in the fields of Carseland and sending ripples through the tall corn beside Mossleigh, but as it rolled across the farmland in the beautiful evening light, it slowly retreated. When I found an owl perched in a barn window west of Milo, it was slow enough to be a breeze.
A great horned owl in a barn west of Milo, Ab., on Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia
Man, crops look good this way. A couple of months ago, when the drought seemed like a sure thing, I never would have guessed that it would end up like this. But the June monsoon came and things started to pick up. It remains to be seen, of course, if the quality of the crops is good.
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Long leaves of corn catch the evening sun in a field near Mossleigh, Ab., Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia
They look good, but as a farmer, Mike, once told me, I’m in the business of growing grain, not straw. Tall crops do not always mean good crops. But I’m pretty sure this year, maybe.
Healthy heads of grain in a field near Mossleigh, Ab., on Monday, August 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia
However, I didn’t necessarily head that way to look at the crops. I was over the moon.
Coming back from the Writing-On-Stone rodeo a week ago, I really enjoyed driving in the dark and stopping here and there to look at the stars as the crescent moon crested the horizon to the west. On one of those stops, by Nanton, I set up on a bridge over Mosquito Creek and took a couple of long exposures of the Milky Way and when I got home and looked at them on my laptop, I thought , yeah, that looks pretty cool.
But they would have looked even better with the moonlight filling in some of the darkness, so I checked the weather forecast for clear night skies as the moon grew in brightness and on Monday, it all seemed to come together. Clear sky, almost full moon.
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So around dinner time, I headed east.
Lake McGregor runs mainly in a north/south direction, long and narrow and surrounded by grasslands. There are no mountains blocking the view here. And it’s far enough from any man-made light source that once the sun went down, the sky would be dark enough to show even the faintest stars. It is true that the city of Milo is nearby, but the few lights along the well-maintained streets would not make a difference.
A mule deer in the last glow of the sun west of Milo, Ab., Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia
So I timed my drive through the farmland to get there as the sun was setting. I passed mule deer in the fields, domed with their velvety antlers, their flanks almost the same shade as the ripening grain. Back at Arrowwood geese were flying into fields that had already been harvested and here closer to Milo, butterflies were clinging to the weeds at the edges of a field while grasshoppers bounced around the ditches.
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The sun sets behind a butterfly in a field west of Milo, Ab., Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia
The moon had risen by eight o’clock in the evening and it was almost nine o’clock when the sun lit up the stubble of a wheat field and then dropped below the western horizon. The silver sides of the old Alberta Wheat Pool elevator in Milo caught their last glow as the moon, now high in the sky, skated across the line where the rose of dusk faded into the night blue.
The sun sets behind a wheat field west of Milo, Ab., Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia The moon hangs in the sky over Milo, Ab., Monday, Aug. 8 August 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia
I scanned the edge of the lake looking for an angle to reflect the moonlight and hopefully the Milky Way, but the breeze, although it was dying down, was still strong enough to whip up waves that would kill any reflection. Looking back towards the horizon from the eastern shore, it still looked lovely, the sunset’s afterglow deep red and orange as the waves picked up the deep blue of the sky above. But it wasn’t going to work for what I had in mind.
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The glow of the setting sun illuminates the horizon at Lake McGregor by Milo, Ab., Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia
So I went back to Milo. There are a couple of places near there where the roads go near the water, so I checked them out. And that’s where I noticed the color of the moon.
It had been silver earlier in the evening, but as the sky darkened, the moon took on a sort of orange glow. It didn’t look bad. It actually looked pretty interesting. But it wasn’t quite what I expected.
It was also lower in the sky than I thought and below it, lying on the southern horizon, was some kind of brownish layer. A thin layer of wildfire smoke coming in from the west? Must be.
Moonlight tinged yellow by some smoke in the air shines over Lake McGregor by Milo, Ab., Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia
By 11 p.m., the stars were bright in the sky above and I was at the provincial boat launch at the northwest corner of the lake. The breeze had dropped considerably and the bays here were almost flat and calm. The moon was bright enough to light up the trees along the shore and the stars above were brilliant pin-points in a bowl of deep, deep blue.
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Yes, things were working as I hoped, but it was another couple of hours before the Milky Way moved into position, so I decided to play with the moonlight to pass the time. Next to it was a picnic table sitting between a tall dead tree on one side and a live one that would have provided some shade during the day on the other.
So I parked there and turned off my light.
When I was setting it up, I knew it would attract a lot of nocturnal bugs, but I was really surprised by the sheer number of them. The first ones came within a couple of minutes of turning on the light, but by the time I sorted it out, there were hundreds.
I moved around the setup snapping photos as I went, trying a few with the trees lit from below, a couple from the side, but while they looked good, they weren’t what I had in mind. But when I went back to the table to move the light again, I saw something much more interesting.
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Flying insects leave trails in the air over a camp light at Lake McGregor by Milo, Ab., Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia
Looking through the beam of light, I could see the insects flying and swirling around, streaks of fluttering white lit from below that stood out boldly against the dark sky around the yellow moon behind them.
So I pulled the truck up to the table, held my camera to the side window, too lazy to set up a tripod, and shot the bugs. It looked pretty cool.
Insects leave tracks in the moonlit water of Lake McGregor by Milo, Ab., Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia
The insects continued to dance even though the lamp’s battery was starting to die, but I finally turned it off and went to find other things to shoot in the moonlight. Passing the small, mostly unoccupied camp, I turned toward the dam that crosses the north end of the lake and parked to watch the moonlight glint on the water.
Now the wind had almost stopped and the water was glassy. A yellow, almost golden light shimmered in small waves and raced across the triangular wakes behind the night-swimming birds. There was a noise in…