I just happened to come across a photo of the night sky taken somewhere in the desert.

It might have been right as I was nearing the end of high school or maybe right before I started college.

I had a habit of going through deviant art profiles because I loved the heavily photoshopped images showing planets placed into some random starry background.

I also had a habit of going through NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day.

On NASA’s website, I came across this photograph of the Milky Way arching across the horizon of some desert at night. I was absolutely mesmerized by what I saw. It didn’t seem real, but there it was.

It was beautiful, mesmerizing, eye-catching. That picture was all of those things.

The picture was taken on a clear night in Death Valley National Park.

It was beauty somehow captured into a photograph.

It sounds really dramatic, but I really was in awe at what I was seeing.

I knew that I wanted to try to do the same. I later learned that this particular field of photography was called astrophotography, literally taking photos of the night sky and celestial objects.

I started googling it and learning as much as I could about astrophotography…given the limitations of my dial-up internet and really janky computer.

And that is how my interest in astrophotography started….