This composite was created on the trail climbing the Southern face of Double Crater in the San Francisco Volcanic Field. To help give a sense of angle, the camera is level, and the Ponderosa Pine on the left is very close to vertical.
I had never tried astrophotography before this week, and when I saw the B&H contest announcement, I figured I'd google a few tutorials and give it a try. I headed out to the local volcano fields to get my shots, but it got unexpectedly cold in a matter of hours (from ~55F to 23F), so I opted not to get out and air down my tires for traction. This resulted in me getting stuck on this very steep trail, which leads to my originally-intended location. However, I thought the composition of the scene before me was interesting, so I set up my tripod with two legs on the drivers side door and one reaching to the passenger side floor, and ended up taking about 80 exposures at various ISOs and durations over two hours. This image is a composite of 26 of those exposures, which were shuttled between Lightroom and Photoshop for combination through median stacking and final adjustment. While there are a few areas I can definitely improve on, I really enjoyed learning a new way to use my camera, and I greatly appreciate the incredible wealth of content freely available from photography blogs, which allowed me to try this for only the cost of gas.