Makawehi Bluffs and Starry Sky, Kauai

I took this composite image at the Makawehi Bluffs, near Poipu, Kauai. I went hiking at this location the day prior and composed the shot in my head. My goal was two fold. 1, to capture the rising milky way with the ocean and bluffs in the foreground. 2, to capture a star-trail with the stars falling into the ocean. I say falling because stars circle Polaris (the north star), which was behind me in this image. I was facing almost due south. The star trails would be half circles leading to the ocean.

So, the next night, I headed back to this bluff hoping for clear skies. This time of the year, the milky way rises late at night. I googled to find that the moon was going to rise at 11:30 pm, so I’d have to go out before that to get a dark sky. I also knew that if I waited until just before the moon rise, that I might catch the milky way low in the sky. Unfortunately, there were serious storms brewing. Things don’t always go as planed. I was lucky to capture anything at all.

I set up the tripod and camera at 7:00pm (just before dark) and took a few exposures of the scene. Then I waited 90 minutes for total darkness and set up to do some star-trail timed exposures. Unfortunately, during the elapsed time from when I arrived to when I started shooting, a storm continued to build and the cloud cover became very thick. . With a 20 knot wind, these clouds were moving very fast, so I decided to stay as long as I could hoping for a break in the clouds. I stayed until it started to rain. Luckily, for about 15 minutes at around 10:00pm, the sky cleared long enough for me to capture most of the sky.

This image you see here is a composite of two images put together using the digital darkroom.

The first image was one of my check images at twilight (the foreground) and the second image was a long exposure taken for the sky. All were taken with a Nikon D500 - Tokina 10-17mm at 10mm, Tripod Mounted, with remote trigger. First shot (foreground and ocean): 10mm, Iso 200, 1-100th of a second at F22. Second shot (Sky): 10mm, iso 1600, 30 seconds at F3.5. Each image was cleaned up separately in Lightroom, then put together using Photoshop using layers. Then, the final image was taken back into Lightroom for a little tweaking and cleanup.

You can see some clouds obscuring part of the sky. I think it adds a moody feel to it. There are also two streaks - both were shooting stars! And for you Cosmo geeks, the bright orange star in the middle is actually the planet Mars. On May 26th, its orbit came very close to the earth - just about 47 million miles away. In fact, the next Mars close approach is July 31, 2018. As for the image itself, what look like star trails on the edges of this image are actually the lens correction from the 10mm fish-eye. The stars in the middle of the photo are sharp. I think it gives this a nice touch.
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