Step by step

aving planned a trip to California’s Eastern Sierra region in autumn 2018, and after scouting around, I found some lovely aspen trees with autumnal colours near the mountain town of Bishop. The gorgeous snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains provided a great backdrop and I knew it would look stunning in an image as the Milky Way became visible. I was aware of a planned SpaceX rocket launch that evening, but I wasn’t sure

HÞ Before processing: the initial images, showing the twilight landscape (left) and the later SpaceX launch plume (right)

< After processing: Brandon’s highly commended ‘Flower Power’ image of the direction, or if it would even be visible from up in the mountains. As the Sun set, I set my foreground exposure and left my camera in place. Towards the end of twilight, I was getting ready to capture the night sky when I suddenly saw a trail of light in my camera’s frame of view, rising up from the mountain and beginning to expand. I quickly adjusted my settings and captured shots of the sky as the launch progressed. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to witness the SpaceX launch in such a beautiful setting, in addition to having it happen directly in my camera’s view. I was excited to return from the field to edit this amazing event using the techniques described here – in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop – to combine my images.

Blending together

The first part of the process involves blending the two initial images (see above). To do this you select the foreground exposure captured at twilight, along