Sometimes it has to be seen to be believed, and we fell in love with this photo of the Milky Way from Photographer Paul Wilson.
Paul lives on New Zealand’s South Island and is a passionate star gazer. He spends endless hours travelling around all-corners of the island and points his camera at the sky. “New Zealand’s great with dark skies,” he says. “If you get out of any city, you can see the Milky Way here.”
He captured this stunning shot of the bay on a still, crisp evening in February. It was around 3:30 am, the tide was going out, and the Milky Way was simply starting to ascend in the eastern sky. Wilson hooked his camera on an panoramic mount and tripod on the edge of the wet sand.
To get his effect, he made 25 20-second exposures, five down and five across, to catch the whole scene. Afterward, he carefully stitched the photographs together.
