Didn’t see the expected meteor shower at 1:30 this morning but was treated to the beauty of a moonless night sky!

I found this article very helpful in getting my gear set properly the evening before so I wouldn’t have to do it ‘in the field’ in the dark. I used my widest, fastest lense a Tamron 17-50mm at f/2.8, 17 mm, ISO 3200 set the mode to BULB and used my wireless timer remote shutter. It was impossible for me to see well enough to fine tune the focus so I crossed my fingers. made sure it was on manual focus and dialed to infinity.

Because of the brightness of our yard light, I took several images with different exposure times. In Lightroom, I selected the image shot at 25 seconds for the horizon and sky (on the left below) and one with a 4 second exposure for the foreground.

The two images were then layered in PhotoShop. I added a layer mask to the darker shot then applied the gradient tool to reveal just the bottom of image for the foreground.

All definitely worth the effort, I’d say. 🙂