Heaven & Earth

This photo shows the Milky Way, as it rises above remarkable rock formations on Colorado's eastern plains. I took this shot during the Lyrid meteor shower, and I have added all five meteors I captured during the night to this one image. These meteors are barely visible at web sizes, but they should be clearly visible in prints 11x16 and larger. To capture the rest of the scene, I combined two very large stitched images - one taken for the foreground shortly after sunset, one taken for the sky when it was darker. I needed to do this to overcome some of the limitations of shooting in extremely low-light situations at night. This scene is essentially what you would see if you had superhuman vision and could see perfectly well at night.