August 14, 2022 • 25 minutes ago • 9 minutes reading • Join discussion 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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Flies, mostly moths, a few water beetles. A mosquito or two. They crawled across the windshield of the truck, hung from the headliner, squirmed in my arms, tangled in my hair. Some of them flashed on the bright rear screen of my camera. Most of them, I ignored. The ones on the camera, I threw them away. I had set up my camp lantern on a picnic table by Lake McGregor outside of Milo to add some light to the scene before me. It was getting close to 11:30 at night and while the moon was bright and yellow, it wasn’t bright enough to illuminate the trees around me, so I took out the lantern and turned it on. Tilting it 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. It took a few minutes of fiddling but I finally got it where I wanted it and got ready to take some pictures.

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The bugs arrived almost immediately. When I had left the city a few hours before, the day had been hot and windy, but as I headed east, it died down a bit. It was still rattling the wheat in the fields by Carseland and sending ripples through the tall corn above Mossleigh, but as I rolled through the field in the lovely evening light it slowly subsided. By the time I found an owl perched on the window of a granary west of Milos, it was almost 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, the crops look good that way. A few months ago, when the drought seemed certain, I never would have guessed that they would end up like this. But the June monsoon passed and things began to develop. 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 afternoon sun in a field near Mossleigh, Ab., Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia They look nice, 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, they might. Healthy ears of corn in a field near Mossleigh, Ab., on Monday, August 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia However, I didn’t necessarily start looking at the crops. I was going out more for the moon. A week ago, coming back from the Writing-On-Stone Rodeo, I really enjoyed driving in the dark and stopping here and there to simply look at the stars as the swelling moon drove the horizon to the west. At one of those stops, by Nanton, I had set up on a bridge over Mosquito Creek and did some 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 look even better with the moonlight filling in some of the darkness, so I watched 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 just in time for dinner, I headed east. Lake McGregor runs mainly in a north/south direction, long and narrow and surrounded by grassland. There are no mountains blocking the view here. And it’s far enough from any man-made light sources that when the sun goes down the sky would be dark enough to show even the faintest stars. It is true that the town of Milo is nearby, but the few lights on the well-maintained streets wouldn’t really make any 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 route through the fields to get there as the sun was setting. I passed mule deer in the fields, bucks with their velvety antlers, making with their flanks almost the same tones as the ripening grain. Behind Arrowwood there were geese flying towards the fields already harvested and here closer to Milo, butterflies stuck to the weeds along the edges of a field while grasshoppers bounced along 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 already risen around 8pm. and it was almost straight until nine when the sun lit up the beard in a field of wheat and then sank below the western horizon. The silver sides of the old Alberta Wheat Pool elevator at Milo caught its last glow while the moon, now high in the sky, skated along the line where the pink of dusk faded into the deepest blue of night. The sun sets behind a wheat field west of Milo, Ab., on Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia The moon hangs in the sky above Milo, Ab., on Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mike Drew/ Postmedia I probed along the lakeshore looking for an angle that would reflect the moonlight and—hopefully—the Milky Way, but the breeze, though reduced, was still strong enough to whip up waves that would kill any reflection. Looking back towards the horizon from the east coast, it still looked magnificent, the sunset trailing a bright red and orange while the waves caught 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 sunset illuminates the horizon at Lake McGregor by Milo, Ab., Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia So I returned to Milos. There are a few places nearby where the roads go near the water, so I checked them out. And there I noticed the color of the moon. It was silver in color earlier in the evening, but as the sky darkened, the moon took on an orange glow. It didn’t look bad. Actually, it looked pretty interesting. But it wasn’t quite what I expected. It was also lower in the sky than I thought it would be and below it, lying on the southern horizon, was a sort of brown layer. A thin layer of wildfire smoke rising from the west? It must be. Moonlight tinged yellow from some smoke in the air shines off Lake McGregor by Milo, Ab., Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia At 11 p.m. the stars were bright in the sky above and I was over at the country boat launch on the northwest corner of the lake. The breeze had dropped quite a bit and the coves here were almost calm. The moon was bright enough to illuminate the trees along the shoreline, and the stars overhead were bright pinpricks in a bowl of deep, deep blue.

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Yes, things were going as I hoped, but it would be another two hours before the Galaxy was in place, so I decided to play with the moonlight for a while away. Nearby was a picnic table that sat between a tall, dead tree on one side and a live tree that would provide some shade during the day on the other. So I parked there and got my light out. As I set it up I knew it would attract a lot of night flying insects, but I was really surprised by the sheer number of them. The first ones arrived within minutes of turning on the light, but by the time I had settled down, there were hundreds. I moved around the set up taking pictures as I went, tried some with the trees lit from below, some from the side, but although they looked ok they weren’t exactly what I had in mind. But when I returned 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 above a camp light at Lake McGregor by Milo, Ab., Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia Looking beyond the light beam, I could see the bugs fly in and swirl, streaks of wavy white lit from below standing out boldly against the dark sky around the yellow moon behind them. So I pulled the truck up to the table, stuck my camera in the side window – too lazy to set up a tripod – and shot away at the bugs. It looked pretty cool. Bugs leave tracks in the moonlit water at Lake McGregor by Milo, Ab., Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. Mike Drew/Postmedia The bugs continued to dance even as the battery in the lamp started to die, but I finally turned it off and went looking for other things to shoot in the moonlight. Passing the small camp – mostly unoccupied – I turned into the dam that crosses the north end of the lake and parked to watch the moonlight glint on the water. The wind had almost stopped now and the water was glassy. Yellow, almost golden light shimmered in tiny ripples and ran along the triangles behind night-swimming birds. There was rustling in the grass beside the road as a rabbit, oblivious to my presence, came out onto the gravel and hopped casually. It was mostly just a dark blob, but the moonlight caught the white…