One of the challenges of shooting in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park at night is that many of the iconic structures of the park are located in very small openings within the forest, which tends to greatly limit your view of the night sky in conjunction with the foreground subjects.  Over the years I’ve learned to just embrace this, accepting the limited view as just a feature of the park I like to shoot in, with last week’s Picture of the Week being the most extreme example yet!  Speaking of last week’s image, I actually shot this week’s picture on the same night.

The Tipton place is famous for the cantilever barn, which I have shot a number of times (here, here, and here), but have always skipped the house itself because it is so buried in the trees.  As you can see from the image above, it’s literally surrounded by them on all sides.  After having shot last week’s image though, I saw it in a “new light”, so to speak, and could see Orion rising above the cabin as I was riding through, so I decided to stop.  I thought to myself, you know what, why not?  Shoot it anyway!

Peeking through the trees you can get glimpses of the Orion-Eridanus bubble, as well as the California Nebula, Pleiades, and a few of their neighbors in the sky.  To light the cabin I used small LED panels, which required multiple shots to create the result you see above.

More next week!

–Dan Thompson