Milky Way Field

This image is where the whole journey started.

While on vacation in Death Valley in 2019, I decided to drive out into the desert in the middle of the night. Around four in the morning I stepped out of the car, looked up, and for the first time in my life truly experienced a dark sky. Living in the Netherlands, I had never seen anything like it. The Milky Way stretched across the sky from horizon to horizon, filled with more stars than I thought were visible to the naked eye.

I took this photograph with a camera and kit lens, not really knowing what I was doing. Looking back, it is far from perfect, but that hardly matters. This image represents the moment astronomy stopped being something I occasionally looked at and became a hobby I genuinely wanted to pursue.

A few years later I bought my first telescope, and the rest is history.