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Stars and starfish

Rob Lyons, from Vancouver, British Columbia

The imager tells how he got this spectacular shot:

I have attempted to take this photograph for three years during my annual trips to Tofino, British Columbia. The first year, I couldn’t find any starfish at all. In the second year, I found some and made an image, but the starfish were so small that you would need a telescope to see them. This past year, after a week of searching, I found a few on my last night of the trip. These starfish were attached to a rock that is at a popular surfing spot, so the waves are very active. To get the foreground, I shot at blue hour and used my Sony A7R camera with a 20mm f/1.8 lens to get up close to the starfish. The tide was coming in fast, and the starfish was already half submerged, so I worked fast to get the shot. I then set up my star tracker on the safety of the rocky cliffs nearby, shot 15 images of the Milky Way [with a Kolari Vision UV/IR-cut and Hα-pass filter], and stacked them together. The two shots were then combined.