Change Is Hard

…but change is certain.

Tag Archives: night sky photography


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Spellbinding

Finally. Since my mid-May camping trip to Sleeping Bear in northern Michigan I’ve been working on my night sky images. I’ve also been backing up my laptop, and experimenting with an external hard drive.

The Platt River, flowing into Lake Michigan, with lots of light pollution from a nearby town.

You know how new things, especially technical new stuff, flummoxes me. So many days went by when I looked at my laptop, sitting over there on the table and didn’t feel smart enough to try.

Looking up the river toward the Milky Way that was just coming up.

But more new photos are filling my camera’s memory card and I have this rule that I can’t download new images until I have finished processing the ones already waiting on the laptop.

Waiting for the Milky Way to rise, I turned the camera to the east at this tree. You’ve seen this image before but I loved it so much I decided to put it in this post too. That’s the northern end of the Milky Way to the right of the tree.

Silly rule. I have so many more pretty things to show you and I’m still wallowing through these stars.

Barr Lake and the Milky Way on my second night of shooting. Do you see the dark horse?

I guess that’s not such a horrible problem to have.

So I’ll show you what the night sky looked at back in May. Recognize that you won’t see the sky like this just by looking up wherever you are, even if you’re in a very dark place.

The tail end of a star-link line of satellites, it was very long, and right behind me as I was shooting the Milky Way over Barr Lake. By the time I got the camera swung around this was all that was left to see.

The camera sees much more light than our eyes do, and then I’ve processed them to bring more light out so that you can appreciate the shapes and patterns that hang out up there.

To the west of me was an outlet for the lake to flow into Lake Michigan, which is just over those dunes.

I’ve tried not to process them too much, but I do have to lighten them some because WordPress and Facebook both post images darker than they appear in my work on the laptop.

I hope you enjoy looking at the night sky. I like having company when I’m out there, and I often think of all of you while I’m shooting, hoping you can feel a little bit like you were there too when you see the images.

This is a stacked, horizontal, image of Barr Lake. That means I took multiple (11) images and stacked them together to weed out image noise.

I can’t wait to get back out there and bring you more.