Arches is an amazing place for photography. It's also surrounded by several national and state parks that in any other state would be flagship parks.
The trouble is that it is heavily subscribed. We're used to being alone, or mostly alone, when we go out in the middle of the night to shoot the sky. In fact Joanne constantly complains that it's cold and a little scary.
Arches is different. My brother and I went on this trip, and woke up each night around 2 or 3 AM to find a spot to capture the rising Milky Way, followed by another location for the pre-dawn and dawn photos.
But even in the middle of the night, each site already had three or four photographers already present! Dawn was worse - each position had a row of guys with tripods out long before dawn, waiting for the moment. It was cold and there were a lot of irritable people.
Anyway, from a stars-and-landscape standpoint, the main problem was the lack of moon to light the foreground (vacation happened to be scheduled over the new moon). I also ended up using the 40D and not renting a higher end body, so exposures had to be longer and there were more star trails.
