There is a fire, a light, in the sky which only the most sensitive eyes can see.  Those eyes are most often cameras and telescopes.  The Milky Way galaxy is a blaze with light if you can see it.  A few weeks ago, that is exactly what Cramer Imaging did: captured fire in the Milky Way.

Astrophotography is something that we dabble in every so often.  I keep hoping that I will get an amazing star trails photograph.  So far, that image still eludes me but I can still get other amazing pictures while I practice.  This was one of those shots.

We went to check out the Perseid meteor shower at it’s peak.  It was a nice show to watch for an hour or so.  There was even a couple of really interesting falling stars as we were trying for the star trails.

We went to our usual haunt away from city lights for best night sky viewing.  unfortunately, this ended up not being as ideal as usual as lots of people had to go driving through the area.  Still, it was dark enough for most of our purposes.

As a bit of a practice or a test shot, we decided that we would use the darkened hillside and the tail of the galactic trail.  It was nicely lined up for a shot.  We started testing exposures.  We had learned previously that the Milky Way is not good subject matter for long exposures of the night sky.  It causes focus issues and strange blurring.

Once we got our exposure settings down, we started working on the main shot we wanted.  In the mean time, we sat back and enjoyed the shower of shooting stars.

This was another time where we did not get the shot we were hoping for, though we got closer to what I want, but we did come back with a perfectly acceptable consolation photograph.

The camera picked up the subtle colors of the galactic arm which are not visible to the naked eye.  The colors of the nebulae and other galactic garbage radiates through the filter of the atmosphere.  The final image resembles the look of a wildfire on the hillside with the light reflecting on clouds.  It’s fire in the Milky Way.