The blue hour gradient

This image was taken in the death valley national park.
I came down from a short hike right after the sunset, and was smoking a cigarette, when I saw a faint silhouette of people on the top of a rock enjoying the sunset, and for some reason everyone was in a way looking at the moon.
I didn't had my tripod, so with the cigarette still in my mouth, I just took the shot hand held by bumping up the ISO and captured this image. To my luck, everyone seem to be looking at the moon, with a little girl pointing at it.
The gradient was beautiful and I tried to make it better by smoothning out the image a bit to remove the noise. Please note that this image was edited in 2018 when there was no AI denoise.