Stars

Not my best shot of the night sky by any means, but it was pretty fun capturing one of the most recognizable set of stars in the sky with a decent foreground composition.

This was from Door County last year, and while not as impressive as seeing the stars out in the Pacific Ocean over Maui, it was still a lot better than what we normally see living 10 minutes from Chicago. It was from September of last year, the only real chance I’ve gotten to shoot the night sky in Door County so far.

Of our other trips to date, it was ridiculously cold last December to be out, and for our April trip, there just wasn’t really a good spot where we were at. Plus, it was the Stanley Cup playoffs and the Hawks were beating up on Calgary, so I couldn’t miss that.

Not sure about going out to shoot this next trip, but we’ll see.

If you want to see more of these, check out the two photosets on Flickr below, and a little bit more of how this all got started.

• Stars Over Door County photoset on Flickr
• Stars Over Maui photoset on Flickr

I don’t know if I’ll ever get tired or shooting the night skies when I visit Maui, or anywhere other than our home near Chicago with decent visibility.

About 2 years ago, I started reading more about Astrophotography, and not only did that help me pick up a few pointers on how to make these images come out better, but it also gave me a sense of what’s next if I want to continue down that path.

I’m referring to is shooting the skies and deep space with the aide of a telescope. Now, since I’m only about 15 minutes from downtown Chicago, I haven’t decided to spend the money on a decent telescope for this seeing as clear skies here show about 2% of what you see above.

Should the time come where we take up a more permanent residence elsewhere, like say Maui, it will definitely be something I want to look into more.

My week at the Maui Photo Festival was more than amazing. More on that soon, as I still have a good number of photos to post online.

As luck would have it, the week also happened to fall during a new moon and the skies were clear almost every night. On our last night there, I took the chance to shoot those amazing skies with one of the many new friends I made on the trip.

Taking advantage of a great spot near the Hyatt, I decided to setup a shot of me sitting at the edge of the lawn looking up at the Milky Way. I thought it came out nice.

Photo: A pre-dawn sky filled with stars as seen from 10,000 feet above sea level atop the Haleakala Summit.

A view of Venus in the West Maui sky as it descends into the ocean.