Celestial Existence

The Milky Way and millions of other stars above Mt Adams and a field

of lupine and paintbrush. Goat Rocks Wilderness, Washington, August 2012.

This is an image from our recent 4 day backpacking trip in the Goat Rocks. This was the only clear night while we were out and I took full advantage of the conditions. To me it seemed like the wildflowers were all looking up and admiring the stars just like I was while creating this image.

Thanks for taking a look and for any comments you have. I appreciate them all!

Very original.

Excellent work! (6)

This pretty much a stunner!  Wonderful composition, and the long exposure is genius.  I think the 'points of color' of the wildflowers are a perfect balance with the myriad of stars in the Milky Way.  Are those lights of towns at right and left of the mountain?  Very cool image!  Cheers!  Chris

Very nice composite image.

Beautiful capture! Absolutly stunning foreground with this night time shot. More starts than I can imagine. I'm wondering which towns are causing the glows on the left and right of Mt Adams.

This one has the Wow factor!

Very good.

I didn't realize it was possible to capture so many stars without such a long exposure they would leave trails unless the camera moved to follow them.  The colors are just fantastic!

Regards, Tom

 

Absolutely gorgeous image Scott! A superb night's work!

All the best,
Neil

Excellent, nice work Scott!

fantastic work

I don't have the expertise to capture anything  like this but I thought I read somewhere that if you keep your exposure under 30 minutes, there should be no star trails. By the way, a fantastic image.

 

Just wondering: was this a single exposure or several?

Thank you to everyone for all of the comments.  I really appreciate it.

Tony - Here are the technical details for this image:

Nikon D800, 14-24 Nikkor at 14mm.

6 image blend using the "auto-blend layers" function in CS6 plus some manual hand blending.
- 5 images for DOF in the foreground flowers. 1/4 sec at f/8, ISO 400. These images were shot ~20 mins after the sun had set. (8:20 PM)
- 1 image for the stars/mountain/clouds. 30 sec at f/2.8, ISO 3200. This image was captured about 90 mins after the first set of images (10:00 PM)

Christopher and Phil - the lights to the right of Mt Adams are from the Portland/Vancouver area and to the left of the mountain is light from The Dalles.