adventures in taking photos of the stars

i was the girl with the telescope in her room & a poster of the solar system above the bed. my brother will confirm our favourite cd-rom to play together on the computer was the magic school bus explores the solar system. in many ways i'm still that girl -- minus the cd-rom but just as endlessly fascinated with looking up & wondering.a couple years ago by pure chance we booked a trip to iceland at the same time as photographer friends from seattle were going to be there. the first night we were there, we drove out into the middle of nowhere, scared ourselves with stories of zombie children climbing out of the abandoned sheds we passed, set up our tripods and shot the stars. we'd never tried it before, & we weren't amazing at it, but our friend jenny who is pretty amazing at it taught us the basics and ever since we've been hungry for more.it's far from glamorous.... you trek outside when you'd maybe rather be sleeping & you hope hope hope for a clear night. most of the time, your fingers freeze. you wear a silly little headlamp on your head. you struggle trying to get the tripod to stand level. you aim into the indiscernible darkness. you argue trying to get the focus right.but then the shutter goes off & for twenty long seconds you're kind of holding your breath, you're looking up at all the stars, you're wondering how it'll turn out. and then the image appears on the screen, & you get a glimpse of what seems impossible : the infinite more number of stars your camera's sensor has captured than your own two eyeballs ever could.& that's what i've always loved about photography, not just of the stars but photography in general. it has a way of showing us what's in between.... the moments, the split-second glances.... all the things in between the obvious that sometimes are missed by our own two eyeballs.taken near north bay, ontario a couple weekends ago, a balmy -24C out, the faint outline of the milky way in the winter sky.