Well Happy Mother’s Day everyone! I hope its been a nice day and you’ve been able to spend time with family. If you know me and my family, then there’s a bit of an Easter egg here in my Star Voyager image that ties it to Mother’s Day, otherwise you’ll just have to guess! 🙂
I’m super excited about this image. For starters, to me, this is the best capture of the night sky that I’ve gotten to date, and like last week’s image, it represents an advancement in both technology and capture technique. In previous years, I would aim to capture about 45 minutes of total exposure time for my night skies. My quest for greater and greater detail though, has brought me to longer and longer total integration times, and this image represents over 2.5 hours of exposure time (9618 seconds to be exact). That helps a lot, but the area where this shipwreck sits is also in decently dark skies, AND I lucked out to have nice clear skies until the very end when those clouds on the horizon crept in, all of which helped to get the detail you see here. Secondly, this image represents an idea I had in my head that I managed to capture as I saw it in my mind’s eye. We were blessed to have one clear night on this trip, and it was right when I needed it, and everything just came together. Haha, this rarely happens for me! If this image doesn’t make it into my 5 favorite photos of the year, I’ll have had an amazing year of imaging! 🙂
Anyway, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do! More night sky next week!
–Dan Thompson