New Year, New Image ✨

Published 6 months ago • 2 min read

my new image

First off, happy new year!

I wish you great health, success in your endeavors, and to have fulfilling experiences surrounded by your loved ones. My hope is that on top of all of that, you also get a chance to reconnect with a dark sky here or there 🤞. Either way, I'll be here to provide you with that connection on some level!

August's Perseids, part II.

After the phenomenal response to the first meteor shower image I shared back in November (thanks again to all who ordered a print), I've finally gotten around to finishing the processing on my second piece from that trip.

Having spent weeks on the first one, the downtime was much needed before I got back to editing the second one. There's something really valuable about stepping away and not cranking everything out in one go - it keeps my eyes fresh, and I think I may have done even better on this one (although I still quite like the first one).

From a compositional stanpoint, this image feels a lot stronger to me, particularly because the meteors point right towards the center of the image (which I truthfully didn't realize would be the case until I actually assembled this image). It is quite comical to me sometimes that although I try my best to visualize what the final image will be while I'm shooting it, my shooting technique really does make it incredibly difficult to know what the piece will look like in the end. This is something I'd like to be more intentional about in 2025 so that I can get closer to nailing my compositions on every shoot.

Without further ado, I present to you:

Boot Arch

What are you looking at?

The image you see was captured in the foothills of the Eastern Sierra mountain range in Southern California. I captured it by my usually modus operandi; highly detailed panorama. This image has a resolution of 14,000 x 15,000 pixels (for reference, your average smartphone tends to shoot images 3,000 x 4,000 pixels). This means you can zoom way in (at least on the full resolution file) and still see incredible details.

In the sky are 83 meteors which I manually placed in the image by hand (each meteor took roughly 1 minute) in the exact part of the sky they originally burned up in as they entered our atmosphere. This is done by matching up the stars from the original frame the meteor was captured in (I let my camera run all night to capture as many as possible).

Although a meteor shower does not look like this in real life (since the meteors fall over the course of multiple nights), this is the closest one can get to an accurate depiction.

Just over the arch you can see a few pink spots in the core of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Those are nebulae known as the Lagoon and Trifid Nebulae (from bottom to top, respectively).

Sitting on the rock is my friend Arne, and just above him in the sky you can see what looks like a galloping horse. This dusty region is often referred to as the Dark Horse Nebula.

This image was captured alongside another friend named Ian Norman whose YouTube channel has long been an inspiration. His videos are what got me started as an astrophotographer, so the opportunity to meet up and shoot together as colleagues was a reall full-circle moment for me. He even made a beautiful video for his channel about our experience there - you have to check it out!