Golden hour over the sail boats. In the distance, a building thunderhead promises rain.
After sunset, I lit up these yachts with my spotlight, one by one, then merged the three images.
The stars began to show, Jupiter and Venus at right.
A slightly blurry image, yet representative of what I saw as the sky darkened. The red lights at lower left show a wind turbine farm, and to their left, Saturn, Antares, and Mars emerged early in the evening. The Milky Way begins to peek along the left side of the image (if you squint hard enough you might see it).
Ah, the Milky Way . . . and a meteor (to the left of the top mast), which was the third meteor I spotted. Indeed, the Perseids might have already begun, while the Scutids and Capricornids are under way.
Jim Livingston said, "The magic is in the post-processing," while discussing how to best make images of the night sky. It is a difficult genre, and magical, too, and these two things compel me to return to view and photograph the night sky.
