Milky Way, Arizona Style

Driving back from an Albuquerque business trip I knew I'd hit the NE Arizona desert in the evening and that the moon wasn't rising until after midnight, so camera gear was ready (an article by Richard Peters gave me the direction on how to get this shot). I pulled off at the exit (#311, I-40) for the Petrified National Forest figuring it'd be dark, and was it EVER. I parked near the gate and got out and couldn't see where to step! But the sky... it was beyond breathtaking. This image doesn't even begin to represent the Milky Way and the immense amount of stars that were all around me out there. I kept hearing Psalm 19:1 in my head! I took several images, this is one of them. The road you see is the path to the forest, and I was up against the closed gate (my tripod was on top of the square cement pillar, very handy!).

Canon 5D Mark II, 16-35mm/2.8 lens, and my very first shoot with a carbon fiber tripod, why did I wait so long?!?

Single image, 30 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 3200. I did shine a light on the foreground in the last few seconds of exposure, and ended up burning it down, was too bright.

BTW, infinity on the lens gave me VERY soft stars. I manually set focus at about TEN feet and that worked best (verified with the 10x zoom in Live View, the best friend of landscape photogs). Later I verified in my DOF calc that 10ft at 2.8 will focus to infinity, FYI.