Today was such a beautiful. It was completely sunny without a cloud in the sky. And as the sun set, the sky continued to stay completely clear, void of clouds. As Summer continues to wane, and Fall becomes the official season, I think there will be more and more days like this.

This was the first night in a very long time without any cloud cover. There was no moon, either. It was 11pm, so I decided to look up how to take night images with my camera, and then I tested it from my apartment.

Holy crap, this actually worked. A little bit, anyway. There was a spot on my lens. Plus, I needed to cut out almost all the darkness from the levels, and crank the brightness a little bit. But, I could see quite a bit of stars. :)

Obviously the best places to take starry photos are from really really dark places. Living in the mountains is perfect for this opportunity because there is very little light pollution. Takayama is small, but it's still the biggest city around here, and gives off some light pollution. I wanted to test my camera a little further. So, I hopped in my car, and drove to Nyuukawa 丹生川.

Nyuukawa Village probably has about 4000 people. It's mostly mountains and forested wilderness, but the area nearest Takayama has some wide open farmland. I drove west from central Nyuukawa until I came across what looked like an open space. I think I actually parked in some guy's driveway.

I could see everything. I could see the Milky Way galaxy, and the millions and millions of stars throughout the entire night sky. It was.. huge. Sure, it was faint. But being engulfed in most darkness allows the eyes to adjust.

I laid down on the ground, and looked up at the starry sky. A bizarre feeling of dizziness came over me. Like I was going to fall over, but I was already lying down. I guess that's vertigo, right? The vastness of space was laid out before me. The near infinite landscape of the cosmos. I saw a shooting star, too!

Anyway, I set up my camera, and took some photos.

They turned out way more clear than the ones I took from my apartment. Unfortunately, the scene was simply to vast, and my camera is not sensitive enough to capture everything.

It was able to capture some interesting things, though. If you look closely at those photos, the star are actually colored either red or blue! It's pretty amazing that my camera is able to capture the temperature of the stars.

About 20 minutes into my time taking photos, an airplane passed by overhead, so I tried to taking photos of that.

All in all, I spent about 45 minutes in this guy's driveway taking photos of the night sky, and the surrounding area. Eventually, the dude's house made a creepy noise, so I started wrapping up after that.

I took a photo of the house just before I left. I think that's another airplane in the sky.