Cory Poole Photography

I think this might be my prettiest image with the Milky Way I've ever taken. Words are hard but I'll try to set and describe the scene a bit. Here we see almost half of the band of the Milky Way (The other half obscured by our planet) appearing to arch over a gorgeous landscape that mirrors it that was sculpted by glaciers into this lovely valley and lake. The rocks and soils at this location are pretty interesting and you get a wide variety of plant life that grows here including some wildflowers that can be both pretty unique. I'm not sure if the small white flowers you see dotting the ground at bottom of the image are rare or not (I think they are pretty) but I can say that when I hiked up here in the late afternoon, I met a team of botanists doing a survey. I wish I had time to chat more with them, but I had places to go and pictures to take. :) In the sky, in addition to the Milky Way, you'll notice some prominent green in some wavy bands. This is air glow and is made up of light emitted by excited oxygen atoms just like the much brighter aurora. It's more common though but I'm still always happy to see it show up in my images.

I had a great time out here on Thursday night watching the stars and taking pictures. It was amazing to have such a lovely spot all to myself. I think I probably took some of my best images that I've ever taken and I hope you like them. Someday I'll share the full 360 degree version of this shot so you can explore the view.

P.S. The full version of this shot (same field of view) is huge at nearly 20,000 pixels wide. It'll be fun to fill a wall with!

I'm back. 😊 Here's a shot if the Milky Way over the Chaos Crags of Lassen National Park.

Time to share this one out again. This is a gallery full of most of the images I've formatted so people can use them on their phones as lockscreens/backgrounds. Please feel free to use them for that purpose. I love to share both my art and the beauty of our universe. Note all images were either taken by me using my cameras or were made using Publicly available images from NASA etc. Hope you enjoy!