A favorite place of mine in the desert southwest is the city of Las Cruces, New Mexico. I’ve been through there several times on cross country trips (I-10 goes right through it) and I went to a wonderful conference there about five years ago.
Coming from the west (i.e., Los Angeles and Phoenix) a dozen miles or so out of town you come over a ridge onto a long downgrade with the whole town laid out before you. About halfway down, there’s a rest stop, where you can get a marvelous view of the city and surrounding areas. (Going west and climbing up this grade in 1980 I looked back and saw the whole valley filled with a thunderstorm and a brilliant rainbow — but no pictures taken, just a fabulous, colorful memory.)
This panoramic picture was taken in May, 2010. (Click to enlarge.) I was on my way from Los Angeles to Mississippi to deliver my son’s truck to him so he could use it while he was stationed in Keesler Air Force Base for a few weeks.
This panorama comes from twenty-six images of 2304 x 3456 pixels (8 megapixels each) taken with a Canon Rebel XT DSLR, combined into an image of 29418 x 3413 pixels (100.4 megapixels). With nothing in the immediate foreground (especially nothing moving) to confuse the stitching software and a lot of big, high-quality images with lots of overlap at the edges, the result is a really, really nice panorama covering about 200°. Blow it up on your screen, look at the Mesilla Valley full of farmland, the Organ Mountains off in the distance (declared a National Monument in May, 2014), the Rio Grande running through it all.
This is good, but if you want to see fantastic, a real out of this world panorama, both in terms of quality and location (literally), take a look at the latest from the Opportunity rover on Mars! Not bad for a robot that’s now in its 3,923rd day of its 90-day mission.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 