Cropped, color and contrast enhancement

The Knolls is located on I-80 highway between Salt Lake City, UT and Wendover, NV in the Great Salt Lake Desert. It's the closest Bortle Class 1 dark sky near me at roughly 100 miles drive. It has its pros and cons. Two main Pros being close proximity and dark sky. The Cons, it's a VERY popular off road vehicle recreation site with silt fine dust and frequent winds from the south. There was an encampment of maybe 60 RVs with assorted OHVs - from dirt bikes up to V8 powered monster sand vehicles. Another Pro is these folks do go to sleep in order to play in the sand the next morning. By 11 pm they were mostly settled in for the night. Then the wind started up; light breeze with small gusts. An hour and a half later steady 10-15 mph wind with 20+ mph gusts. Needless to say the silt fine dust was blowing and the gusts were strong enough to shake the tripods and blur the long exposure images. So I made the most of the session, took as many photos on 3 cameras as possible before packing up and arriving home around 3AM.

Oh, I forgot to mention the weather forecast. Mainly clear and the only mostly cloud free dark sky within 200 miles. The south and southwest deserts had clouds. Las Vegas was clear but 6.5 hours drive away. So I captured a lotta little clouds and "ate" some dust. ha ha!

Somehow I got a wee bit heavy handed with the post processing on this image...just for grins. I'll post a few more this week.