Celestial Sky over Montana

Montana got its nickname from a novel. A. B. Guthrie Jr. published The Big Sky in 1947, and in the early 1960s the state took the phrase for its slogan. It fit the whole state better than the older "Land of Shining Mountains," because the Great Plains cover about two-thirds of Montana.

Those plains are where the homesteaders went. After the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 doubled a claim to 320 acres, they came to Montana by the tens of thousands. Drought arrived in 1917 and stayed, and by the mid-1920s most of them had gone. Montana lost population over the 1920s while the rest of the country grew. Some simply opened their fences and drove away. Many of the buildings they left are still standing, one to a horizon.

What stayed was the sky. With few towns and fewer lights, a clear night out on the eastern plains can look a lot like this picture.

The Milky Way crosses the whole frame on a diagonal, its star clouds and dust lanes in blue, violet and white. Below it, a small wooden barn with a lean-to stands alone at the right, dark against a strip of grass, and a line of low mountains runs along the horizon. There is no other light anywhere in the scene.