This was taken on July 11, 2015, 11:28 PM at Otter Cove in Acadia National Park during a night photography workshop that I co-instructed with Mike Taylor and Vincent Lawrence. The Milky Way can be seen above Baker Island Lighthouse on the horizon. The light reflecting over Otter Cove is from an old fishing shack that I have captured star trails over before. The Big Dipper can be seen shining brightly over the lights of Bar Harbor.

Usually I would shoot a multi-row spherical panorama with longer exposures of the ground for a brighter foreground and more details, but I didn’t want to take that much time during a workshop, so this is stitched from eight single exposures with a fisheye lens. I used a lot of overlap because the outer edge of the shaved fisheye lens is not that sharp.

Camera settings: 10.5mm, f/2.8, ISO 5000, 30 seconds

Equipment used: Nikon D810, Nikon 10.5mm f/2.8 fisheye (shaved lens hood), Promote Control, Panoneed robotic head, and Really Right Stuff TVC-34L tripod w/ leveling base. Long exposure noise reduction via Pixel Fixer, RAW conversion via Lightroom, stitched with PTGui, and planned with PhotoPills.