Photos of Northern Night Skies

On stars, satellites and the changing night sky

This summer’s night skies in northern Minnesota were spectacular as always. That’s not all that newsworthy for a newsletter. Yet every time I step outside my house near Grand Marais and look up at the night sky on a moonless night, it feels unreal. I grew up in a city and did spend time in the Iowa countryside looking at stars, but nothing I saw there or anywhere else growing up compared to what I see here. I’m awestruck every time.

This year started off with amazing night views and stellar Milky Way shots, like the one above of the Milky Way over a small river near Grand Marais. The northern lights even made an appearance over another river. That’s shown in the view below.

While I’m not religious, I do enjoy photographing the phenomena of religion. Father Baraga’s cross is shown below. In the sky above, two satellites cross each other. Had I shot this shot at a slightly different moment they would have formed a cross in the sky. There are proposals to put thousands and thousands of AI data center satellites into orbit. Perhaps, there’s something to be said about photographing a cross under a sky where humans are trying to create an intelligence of their own.

Naming a certain movie here would seem to be cliché, but we seem to be living in a constant state of cliché where movies of the past weren’t fantasy. They were prophecy.

Speaking of AI, sometime between making the photograph of Baraga’s cross and the photograph of the road and pines below, Adobe’s Denoise started introducing new artifacts into my night-sky images — they appear as blue or green blobs that appear between branches of the trees — and even with the new feather and edge tools in Adobe Lightroom, images still get halos when using AI masks (as seen below). Those halos take a long time to manually burn away. So maybe we don’t have to worry about Skynet just yet.

Still, standing out on a road at night under the stars I can’t help to think about where we are heading. Sometimes we can’t see around the next bend, so we keep traveling until the next stretch of road appears. Other times the road seems to disappear into the infinity of the universe. We keep traveling, but never seem to reach the end.

Despite not knowing where we are going, I do know that we are seeing more and more human items in space, as the photo below testifies. Look at all the satellites in the sky as shown in a 25 second photo below. When I was a kid, if we saw one satellite in the sky at night we thought it was cool.

Now, not so much.

But all things do come to an end. That’s shown in the same photo below. I caught a meteor burning away into dust as it entered Earth’s atmosphere.

With summer turning to fall and the Milky Way’s core sinking below the horizon, this season of the night sky is coming to an end. I do fear that in the near future, what we had will be lost to our children. When tens of thousands of satellites cloud the view, I wonder if we will look back and wish we protected the views we once had.

Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this week’s musings. If you want to learn more about photography, my 2027 photography workshops are open for registration and I have space available on my November online Lightroom class. Check it out if you’re so inclined. I’ll see you again in two weeks.