Starry night at Noxon While camping, we set up our cameras on shore of the Clark Fork with the Milky Way and thousands of stars twinkling away on the moonless night of September 19, 2012. I opened the camera shutter and then headed into the tent and went to sleep, hoping a train would come by before the camera battery was used up, along with any hope of a photograph. A horn from an eastbound coal train blasting through distant Heron woke me out of a sleep. I crawled out of a warm sleeping bag to watch and listen to the spectacle of unfolding before me. I could hear a rumble of a westbound that soon disappeared as the train headed in at Noxon siding for a meet. A distant signal lit up and went to flashing yellow. The eastbound train grew louder and final curved over the fill in the foreground, lighting up the water like a bed of diamonds. Once the coal train passed, I closed the camera and headed back to slumberland, hoping there would be enough battery to process the image. The photo ended up being 2 hours and 2 minutes (that’s 7,307 seconds!) to capture the movement of the stars, Milky Way and eastbound tonnage through a clear Montana night at Noxon, on Montana Rail Link’s Fourth Subdivision. And thankfully, no encounter with some grizzled wildlife in the middle of the night either!
