Catching a Fireball in the Cold
Mike Taylor has been a landscape and studio photographer for over 20 years and teaches night photography and processing technique workshops for the public. His images recently illustrated the book “The Secret Galaxy” by Fran Hodgkins (Tilbury House Publishers, 2014). Taylor contributed this article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.In Maine, the temperature was a bone-chilling zero degrees on the night of Feb. 16, and getting colder with a slight wind chill. The skies hadn’t been clear of clouds or precipitation for what seemed like weeks, so the opportunity to shoot the night sky was hard to pass up. After all, this was to be my second chance in 2015 to capture the Milky Way rising in the New England skies.
Since last September, my girlfriend/business partner and I had been planning a night sky shoot at Sandy Point Beach on the Penobscot River in Stockton Springs, about an hour’s drive away. We had been trying to get the right alignment of low tide, galaxy rise, moon phase and weather.
Having visited Sandy Point in the spring and summer, we had since plotted where the Milky Way would rise in relation to the beach — and the wonderful old pier pilings that long ago lost their decks — so we were confident of a strong composition if the weather continued to cooperate.
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Interesting article about a night shoot
