Photographer Chases Dark Skies to Capture Milky Way the Old-School Way—From Mountaintops to Desert Valleys

Nighttime photography featuring the Milky Way in various U.S. locations. Courtesy of Mary Jo Machnica

Mary Jo Machnica still remembers that old-school photography smell—the vinegary odor of real film developer in the darkroom of her high school photography class in 1978.

Today, Machnica, 64, has adopted some new-school photography techniques, shooting with a mirrorless digital frame and retouching her shots with Adobe Lightroom (though she still doesn’t touch AI). She has also mastered a genre that hardly existed in the era of film—night photography—using apps such as PhotoPills and Stellarium to track the planets, the moon, and the Milky Way.