About this limited edition photograph:

The stacked photograph “Daley’s Astro” was created at the (now deceased) Daley’s Bowstring Bridge in Winneshiek County, Iowa.

In 2017, a 20-ton semi drove over the Daley’s Bowstring Bridge, a bridge with a 3-ton weight limit, and collapsed it into the Upper Iowa River. This was a sad day as the Daley’s Bowstring Bridge was a rare example of a bowstring bridge, and one of only a few left in the state of Iowa. Additionally, the bridge’s location has among the lowest light polluted skies in the area. This bridge made for one of my favorite subjects to photograph at night, and the dark skies allowed me to produce great astrophotographs with little light pollution. RIP.

Daley’s Astro is comprised of (100) 30-second exposures (f2.8 aperture and ISO 1600) stacked.

I created this stacked photograph by setting up my Canon 80d camera with a Tokina AT-X 116 PRO DX II lens on a tripod on the deck of the bridge. The road that this bridge is on only has a couple of houses on it, so it sees zero traffic at night, allowing me to safely photograph. I created a timelapse ((100) 30-second exposures) to capture the movement of the stars. I used free software called StarStax to stack all 100 exposures of the stars into star trails, and I used the “Comet Mode” setting to turn those star trails into comets. The resulting stacked image is Daley’s Astro. 

Nocturnal Designs © 2016.