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July 6, 2014

MILKY WAY—ROUND TWO

... at a few minutes before 11pm chad parked out back ... it only took him a few minutes to figure that i was waiting out front, then we were on our way to pemaquid point ... moon had already set when we arrived, it was so dark that i couldn't see my own feet as i climbed across the jagged rocks ... the passing storm had driven rather warm air up from the south, making the peninsula unusually balmy for this time of night ...

... the powerful beam of the lighthouse's fresnel lens painted the trees with bright light ...

... to the unaided eye this scene was almost total blackness ... it was a 120 second exposure that brought out the light of a few tens of billions stars contained in this arc of our galaxy ... the red on the horizon is the city of portland ...

... at three in the morning, hours before sunrise, the approaching dawn began to wash the milky way from view ...

... we perched precariously upon one of the great ridges of intrusive pegmatite as only a few feet below us huge waves smashed against the ancient rocks ...

... chad should be one of those store front window models in new york ... i know very few people who can remain so perfectly still for almost a full minute ...

... at the famous "reflecting pool" i managed to set up my tripod so that the lens of my camera was less than a foot from surface of the still water ... reclining my not-quite-as-young-and-spry-as-it-used-to-be body along the hard irregular surface was an accomplishment in and of itself ...

 ... taken within the space of only a few minutes, both these images are "natural color" impressions of a scene that expressed itself with seemingly infinite variation ...

... greatly inspired by one of chad's pictures of the cape elizabeth lighthouse, i finished my visit to pemaquid with this poster shot ...

To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.
RACHEL CARSON

... i hope these simple images allow you some sense of sunrise at pemaquid ... i wish all of you could have been there ...