I have to confess. I don't look up at the stars nearly enough. My telescope gathers dust in the corner of our home. Far too much of my gazing is done on YouTube and Twitter for iPhone these days.

I am a space blogger, a wannabe outer space magazine chief editor (a confession for another day). Yet, I can count on exactly one finger how many times I've wandered out into the wilderness specifically to look up at the stars. And that was four Tuesdays ago with my new friend, Andrew, who, at my son's last soccer game of the season, invited me to tag along with him sometime.

I also have to confess that I hesitated to go when he reached out only days later. Oh, he was serious about that? These things are just small talk, though. Like, tomorrow tomorrow?

It's not that I didn't want to go. I really did want to hang out with my new cool friend with the cool hobbies. It's just that it was gonna be at 11 at night and kinda chilly in the mountains...We wouldn't get back until two in the morning...got this great Andor review to post...will be pretty wiped after that...going on a big road trip in a couple days...

You know what, though? Screw that business!

So, I laced up my Sorels, grabbed my ear muffs (good hair day), cracked open a Coke (full diesel), and turned on the seat-warmers in the passenger seat as we trekked on up toward Cuyumaca Peak to have an incredible time.

Finding Infinity

It was peaceful up on the mountain, completely silent besides the soft whistle of a light breeze and the crunching of gravel under our shoes. There wasn't another living soul around, but as a courtesy to anyone who might show up, Andrew wore his red-light headlamp as he quietly worked with his camera. I stole a peak at the viewfinder as he adjusted the focus.

"So, you only have to focus the one time then?"

I confess, I sometimes say these types of things when holding the black tape for my electrician brother-in-law, for example, when he's doing wiring work at my parents' house, usually while squinting and pursing my lips in a certain way. Don't mind me. Just making intelligent conversation.

In defense of my question this time around, I was in awe right then. When it's been a while since you've seen stars like that, it really does seem like you can reach out and touch the big ones, and the tight clusters of tiny ones seem so much further away. The night sky is so 3D. Surely one would have to readjust focus on the tiny far away ones.

Unperturbed and as if it were a perfectly valid grown-up question, Andrew answered something like, "The stars, as far as the camera is concerned, are all the same distance away... basically, infinity," while continuing to manually dial in on one of the brightest stars. There really is no autofocus or special lens setting for "infinity" I found out. This all-important step required the patience and precision of a doctor, which Andrew is, which worked out well.

I nodded knowingly, pondering infinity as I took a deep breath of the crisp mountain air, almost spinning myself dizzy, constantly turning around and staring up at all the stars surrounding us, getting lost in the endlessness up there.

Trial and Error

This was Andrew's first time out as an astrophotographer. It was practice for a more ambitious trip to Death Valley next spring when the photogenic middle of the Milky Way comes back around. We were just happy to see the smokey wisps of our galaxy's outer rim. Excited, Andrew aimed his camera toward the sky above El Centro to capture some of the best parts of it.

I admit, I had never seen Andromeda--our next door neighbor galaxy and the most distant object visible to the unaided eye--or known I had seen it. Neither of us knew we were looking directly at a distant galaxy that night. But days later, when we had a chance to dissect the images, there it was, hanging askew in the sky above El Centro. To see the tiny spiral of a far away galaxy through the haze of our own absolutely blew my mind and will continue to do so every time I look at these pictures. I'll seek Andromeda out now any time I look up on a dark night. There could be a whole galactic empire there.

I saw four shooting stars in the time we were on the mountain. That was a record for me. They included the brightest fireball I had ever seen in the sky. "Holy--," I said, certain that one made deep impact somewhere to the north of us in the Coachella Valley. Or was it south into Mexico? I was turned around.

Two of them happened close enough together in both time and space that I tried to coax Andrew to swing his tripod around to try to catch the next one mid streak. We discussed how hard it would be to time a shooting star just right on a night like that. Sheer luck probably. We wondered what a jet streaking across the sky might look like. Not too terribly cool, it turned out. Just a stupid line that looked like a scratch on his screen, more of a visual nuisance really. Overtaken by the realization, I preached into the void on behalf of all astrophotographers, like us, about the nuisance all sky-bound manmade objects were becoming, especially with more and more satellite constellations being launched each and every year with no end in sight.

"On the bright side, more satellites means more de-orbits, which will surely create many more shooting stars," I concluded out loud, wrapping up debate with myself.

There's a lot of trial and error in astrophotography I learned, which only adds to the fun. Every minute or so, Andrew would react with a "Whoa, look at that!" as another stunning image popped up on his screen. A camera sees things differently than the naked eye. So, as amazing as the canopy of stars looks live, the picture that appears when the settings are just right is its own delight.

The trick is getting the right ISO (light sensitivity), F-stop (lens aperture) and shutter-speed combination, Andrew explained. Rule of thumb: The shutter speed should probably be somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds. Less than that and the stars might not show up. Keep the shutter open past about 20 seconds and you can get star trails due to the rotation of the Earth. But there are mounts you can buy that account for the Earth's rotation so you can keep the shutter open for longer, he noted. These must be the same mounts that make the great time-lapse videos I've seen on YouTube with the Milky Way fixed in the sky and the ground turning beneath it.

Just 20 seconds for the Earth to turn, you say? I stared at the galaxy's rim near the horizon and imagined myself tumbling through space.

No Signal

"Shoot. I should have at least brought a notepad to write all of your camera settings down for you. Or do you just remember?" I asked like it was 1994.

No need for that. All the settings are saved by the camera and recorded right in the image, Andrew answered. Of course. The all-knowing metadata. Technology these days.

Today's technology meant Andrew didn't have to pack a mini-observatory to take great photos. A regular-looking Nikon with a regular-sized wide-angle lens mounted on your basic tripod did the trick. He had virtually unlimited shots, and he could view all the images he took right away on the camera screen and then in more detail on the laptop he brought with, which itself was loaded with software that could adjust the raw images to make them even better. No doubt he learned two semesters' worth of astrophotography from free YouTube videos or blog or two. Later, we'd be able to easily share our experience with people halfway around the world.

We had the best of all worlds up there. We had all of the benefits of all of the amazing technological advances of the last three decades AND the peace and quiet of a simpler time. We had absolutely no cell phone service and it was amazing. Darned if I didn't feel pretty pleased with myself for not once checking Twitter in any one of the hours of our mountain excursion, even when I got my bars back.

I confess, I got a little caught up in that last bit. Maybe it was the Pearl Jam we listened to on the way down the mountain or the swapping of our favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. Just two Gen-Xers basically basking in the unrivaled glory that was the 1990s. "Wasn't everything so much better before the constant swirl of social media swerved the internet right over a cliff?" I asked almost as eloquently as that. I was ready to shed the whole shebang.

To be more diplomatic, it dawned on me, astrophotography may just be the perfect hobby to tear oneself away from all of the [mostly] insignificant distractions that come along with living in a connected world and just exist in the awesome quiet of the universe for a while.

"For me, it's about seeing our galaxy and how small we really are," Andrew said when I asked him later about his new hobby. "Just being away from the city. Just hearing the wind and being among the stars. It's always beautiful."

I can't wait to go there again.