This week I am wrapping up my series of night sky images with my first Milky Way core image of this year – taken back at the beginning of March! We often refer to this end of the Milky Way as the “summer” end (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere), but the reality is it can start to be seen just before sunrise as early as late January, depending on how the phases of the moon work out. It does require getting up painfully early (I think I left the house before 3AM to get this image) though!
I had had this composition in mind for a while, and in early March I was seeing the skies were looking favorable, so I set out on the long drive up to Newfound Gap. Subsequently, Dave Green, another photographer who I had spoken to online occasionally, was in town for a work conference and so I invited him to join me, and he and one of his coworkers took me up on it! It was a fun morning of chitchatting while we waited for our cameras to do their thing – you can see his work at dave-has-a-camera.com! For this particular scene, I used my lantern and small light to illuminate the foreground. You’ll also see some lights in the mountains, which are people driving to / from Cherokee, NC. I then tracked / stacked the sky portion of the image.
As I mentioned, this image was my first Milky Way image of 2025, but it has not been my last! I’m already hard at work on my next night time series, but first, I wanted to share some images from my travels this year. Next week Picture of the Week will hop on a plane and head over to the Middle East!
–Dan Thompson