Starry Night at Bald Peak, Acadia National Park

The top of a mountain in Acadia National Park is a great location to take in a sunset. Better still is to extend that sunset photography opportunity into night sky photography.

It is hard to make a bad composition of the milky way, but adding an interesting foreground usually improves nightscapes. My eye is naturally drawn to mountain peak markers, and the Bald Peak marker was available.

The next step in composing this image was determining the ideal balance of the marker with the milky way, and the camera position illustrated here seemed optimal of the accessible shot locations.

The Sony FE 24mm f/1.4 GM Lens is one of the best nightscape lenses ever made. While the ultra-wide f/1.4 aperture is one of this lens's key nightscape advantages, the 24mm f/1.4 depth of field is shallow, too shallow to keep this sign and milky way sharp. Thus, this capture required an image focused on the peak marker and another focused on the stars.

Post-processing the two image stack was simple. The images were layered into a Photoshop file, and a layer mask was added to the top layer. Painting the mask black reveals that portion of the layer below, the peak marker and rocks in this case.

A larger version of this image is available on Flickr.