(tranquil music)
Small and lucky, nothing inspires feelings like those
more than being alone in landscapes like this,
but there's a side to Death Valley
that I haven't fully explored yet,
one that only reveals itself
once the tourists have scattered back to their cars
and the sun has dipped below the horizon.
Of course, what I'm talking about is the darkness of night.
(dramatic music)
Immense darkness, in fact,
the kind that can only be found in a place
as remote as Death Valley.
And Harun Mehmedinovic,
the man behind this amazing time lapse photography,
is the perfect guy to introduce me to this new environment.
(dramatic music)
Oh, we did it.
- [Harun] Yeah, not bad.
- [Baratunde] Quite a meeting spot you picked.
- [Harun] It's good, yeah.
Where we're standing here
is one of the last remaining pristine night sky places
that we have left in America.
So when we're looking at most to this park,
especially towards the north from here,
we're looking at about 100, 150 miles
without artificial light.
- [Baratunde] Over 100 miles with no artificial light
is a big deal.
It means that the skies here are exceptionally dark,
a sight that Harun has cherished since he was a kid.
- I grew up in Bosnia.
My dad's family is out from the country,
and part of that lifestyle was telling stories.
So you would gather at night, and you'd have a feast,
and you'd eat, and all that sort of good stuff.
(tranquil music)
That was a pretty dark place,
so you could see the Milky Way.
That experience of actually seeing the night sky
and the wonder of it, it was very important
sort of from an imagination standpoint, for me.
- Thinking about being able to actually see the stars
and the universe,
it kind of takes the limits off the world, right?
It opens up the lid on that box.
This was a major reason why Harun,
after moving to America,
decided to get into nighttime photography,
which he sees as much more than just an art form.
- [Harun] You know, with astrophotography,
you become an activist in a way.
- [Baratunde] How so?
- Because when you take images of pristine night sky,
everybody's going to immediately ask, "Is that real?"
Because we don't see it anywhere.
So if you just take these kind of images,
you are already telling a story of something
that we're losing, or we have lost.
- 'Cause most people don't have that experience.
They can't look up and see those stars,
so they're like, "It's a fake."
- It's amazing how much we have now become separated
from the nature.
- Turns out astrophotography
is all about reconnecting with nature
to an extent that I might not be so crazy about.
Oh, man.
(Baratunde and Harun laughing)
- [Harun] Every time you take a step on a sand dune,
you lose half a step.
It is a workout.
- [Baratunde] It's like a dance move I didn't sign up for.
- [Harun] Yeah.
- [Baratunde] This is not graceful.
(Harun speaking indistinctly)
I do not feel good about you right now.
Oh, good, you slipped.
That makes me feel better.
- [Harun] All right.
- Yeah, I do that all the time.
(Harun laughing)
- (sighs) Geez.
So what was your first impression of these sand dunes?
- Yeah, so the first time I got out here,
it was quite a few years ago.
It was incredibly windy.
I remember we left a couple of things on the dash,
and we went out, and when we came back,
they were melted into the dashboard.
- [Baratunde] Oh, that's hot.
- Yep.
- Okay, lesson learned.
- Lesson learned.
- [Baratunde] It was perhaps not the best first impression,
but Death Valley would get a second chance
to win over Harun when he visited for an overnight trip.
- When I came back and I stayed overnight,
I looked up and it was unbelievable.
(tranquil music)
You can see the, this incredible universe out here,
and really, that's what got me in many ways
into taking shots of the night.
- [Baratunde] More and more of our dark skies are being lost
to light pollution, and that loss can disconnect us
from the ways our ancestors experienced the outdoors.
- It's really important
to almost every population you can think of,
there's a night sky element to it,
and sometimes it's actually practical.
- There's an old spiritual
that escaped slaves used to sing that excites-
- Drinking gourd.
- Yeah, the drinking gourd, which is the Dipper.
- [Harun] The Big Dipper, exactly.
There is a value to the night sky.
It's a spiritual value,
but also it's the source of religion and of science,
and it's the sort of source of all key questions
that we have about where we're at and who we are.
- Harun ultimately became
a Death Valley artist in residence.
And while it's clear that he embraced the artist part
of that title, I'm curious how he found it being a resident.
Do you come out here alone?
- I spent months at a time here alone, in fact.
- Months?
- Yes.
- What's that like?
- Incredibly peaceful because at night
there's gonna be hours upon hours of nobody being around,
not a single lot of car, not a single lot of person,
not any light, nothing.
And the beauty of the star gazing is
that it actually forces you to be in a meditative state.
Like when you looking up at it, you are meditating.
- So if someone's having
a hard time meditating, your prescription?
- [Harun] Is star gazing.
(tranquil music)
All right, so this will be one of our spots for tonight.
We're looking for always
some kind of an interesting foreground,
and the foreground should be something
that tells a little bit of a story of a location.
You always wanna add a little context.
- This is why you're the professional.
- I don't know.
(Baratunde and Harun laughing)
(tranquil music)
When you look at the stars, you're looking at stars
that have died sometimes many, many, many years ago.
We can't even grasp the idea
that some of the things we're seeing up there
were created billions of years ago
and they'll last billions of years past us.
- I love the idea of your light lasting
beyond your life, that's cool.
Above me, the same sea of stars that Harun saw
as a young boy emerges.
It's not hard to understand why he and his family,
like so many others before them,
have seen fit to tell stories about sites like this,
stories that seem to transcend time and space,
that help explain who we are,
why we're here, and where we're going.
Whoa, it's happening.
There's so many more stars.
(tranquil music)