Midsummer Night's Dream

Yesterday I was thinking back on some of the nights that I've gone out to photograph the Milky Way last year and realized I still have images from those nights that I want to work on and share.  Here is one of those images, taken on the night of July 29, 2014.  This was the 3rd night in a row I had gone out to photograph the Milky Way.  The first two nights were beautiful, but the conditions were not quite ideal.  There was too much humidity creating a haze in the sky that made the stars look too faint in my images.  The third night was cooler with less humidity and it's amazing how much crisper and brighter the stars looked.  

I made a lot of photographs that night, some of which were shared with you a few days later.  This one, however, never got shared until now.  I don't know why, because I really like it!  It has one of my "character" trees in it.  This particular tree I call "The Conductor", because when viewed from the opposite side, it has branches that curve upwards in a way that makes it look like the conductor of a symphony.  The main reasons I like this photo are because of the clarity of the Milky Way, the "conductor" tree, and the streaks of two early Perseid meteors that I managed to be lucky enough to capture in this frame.  The Perseid meteor shower typically peaks a week or two into August, but they start becoming visible in late July.  I consider myself incredibly lucky to have caught these two streaks so prominently in this photo!  Oh, there is also some "airglow" evident in this photo (the horizontal streaks of light).  When I first captured airglow in a night photo, I wasn't sure if I liked it.  But, I've come to appreciate it more and feel it adds even more impact to photographs of the night sky :-)