Moon over Yaquina Head at blue hour, the lamp already turning.
Yaquina Head, Oregon · December 2025
The place
There is a moment on the Oregon coast when the sun is gone and the sky has not decided what to do yet. The sea goes flat and silver. Then a light comes on at the end of the headland and begins its slow turn, and you realise you have been waiting for it.
That light has come on every night since August 20, 1873. Fayette Crosby, the first keeper, lit a four wick lamp burning lard oil, and the beam went out over the water for the first time. The tower stands 93 feet, the tallest on the Oregon coast. Inside it is a first order Fresnel lens, built in Paris in 1868 by Barbier and Fenestre, shipped from France and unpacked at the head in October 1872, ten months before anyone lit it. It is still up there. The same glass has been bending the same beam for more than 150 years.
The keepers left in 1966 when the light was automated. The lamp behind the lens has changed many times. Lard oil, then kerosene, then electricity in 1933. On December 2, 2018 the halogen bulb gave way to a stack of 36 LEDs, and Yaquina Head became the second lighthouse in the country to make that change and the first on the West Coast. New light, old lens. The pattern is unchanged. Two seconds on, two off, two on, fourteen off, all night, every night.
How it was made
Early December 2025. One frame at 28 mm, f/2.8, 1/60 of a second, ISO 200, held back by two thirds of a stop so the sky would not wash out.
Those numbers say the light was nearly gone. The aperture wide open, a slow shutter, and the sensor still needed a push. Blue hour, in other words. The sun was down, the sky still held a little colour, and the moon was already up, which is why the picture exists at all. A few minutes either way and it is a different photograph.
Light as an instrument
Something I keep noticing. The thing that makes a lighthouse work, bright light at the right hour, is being tested as a treatment.
In February 2026 a research team published a randomized controlled trial in Frontiers in Psychiatry. Forty eight inpatients with depression were split into two groups. One sat in front of a 10,000 lux lamp for thirty minutes between nine and ten each morning for fourteen days. The other got 100 lux, a dim light that looks like a treatment but is not. At the end, the bright light group had lower fasting blood glucose and a lower daily average of cortisol, the stress hormone, than the dim light group.
It was one hospital and two weeks, so hold it lightly. But it fits a pattern that keeps turning up. Light at the right hour reaches further into the body than the eyes. The keepers at Yaquina Head knew the first half of that by heart. They lit the lamp at dusk for more than ninety years.
Richard Abraham, MD
Healing Light Media
Sources
Yaquina Head Lighthouse, Oregon Encyclopedia. History of Yaquina Head Lighthouse, Bureau of Land Management. A new LED lamp and the evolution of Yaquina Head light sources, Friends of Yaquina Lighthouses. Fang J and others, The effect of bright light therapy on glycemic control and cortisol rhythmicity in depression, a randomized controlled trial, Frontiers in Psychiatry, February 11, 2026.