Interesting Photo of the Day: Vertical Panorama of the Milky Way Over Arches National Park

Interesting Photos  •  Milky Way Photography

Arches National Park, Utah may be a desert, but it’s very rarely deserted, thanks to its iconic rock formations, which attract hoards of camera-wielding tourists year-round.

Thankfully, however, there was no traffic in the park at 3:00 a.m. when landscape and astrophotographer Mike Taylor decided to set up his gear in the middle of the road to photograph the Milky Way:

“Who Goes There?” by Mike Taylor (Via Imgur. Click image to see full size.)

“Who Goes There?” is both a multiple exposure and a vertical panorama. Taylor created the image using a Nikon D600 and Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8G ED. He photographed the sky in four different 25-second shots at f/2.8 and ISO 4000—allowing for 25–40 percent overlap—and captured the foreground at f/2.8 and ISO 1600 for 282 seconds. He then processed the images and stitched them together with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CC.

As a contributing member of the International Dark Sky Association, Taylor assured Redditors that the meteor in the photo is perfectly real and that he’s witnessed and even captured his fair share of them while out shooting:

“This was all luck. I’ve gone out shooting meteor showers and gotten some cool images, but it’s always the random fireballs like this that come out of nowhere… I’ve captured a handful of [fireball] meteors in the past few years, including this shot that was picked by NASA for APOD in May 2014.”