This was taken on July 12, 2015, 12:07 AM 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 arcs over Otter Cove while the Big Dipper shines over the triple-arched bridge of the Park Loop Road. Low tide was coming up at 2:16 AM.

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 6400, 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.