Lights in the Sky

On one of our last nights together for the summer, Hil and I drove out to a rural part of Illinois about 45 minutes away to get a good look at the sky without any light pollution from Champaign-Urbana, or any of the other surrounding towns.  After finding a pull off near a tractor shed on a side country road I set up my camera.  The trip was inspired by a few articles that I have read recently about getting a good shot of the milk way.  While the area we found was not totally ideal (we really needed to head to the Western US) we still got a good view before some light clouds started to move in.  Other than that the weather was perfect, and it was nice to get out where it was quiet and relax.We were out there for about hour and during the entire time only two cars passed down the road that we were stopped on which worked out great as headlights messed up my pictures.  Since the sun had only been down for a couple hours I had to take long (30 second) exposures but things turned out as well as I had hoped.  So hear are some shots of what we saw that night!This work by JD Maloney is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.