Photographing landscapes on new moon nights is a fascinating and demanding experience. Even using top-of-the-range digital cameras, sensors are pushed to the limit of their performance.

While walking near the Douro River a few days ago, on a new moon night, I saw this isolated maritime pine, and I was immediately in love with the landscape. The sky was full of stars and practically cloudless. In the place where I was, there were no houses nearby, but in the background, on the other side of the river, there were many scattered lights from houses and public road lighting.

A small fraction of this light radiation reached where I was, despite being a few kilometres away, and allowed me to see the tree (barely). To focus it, I illuminated the tree with a powerful LED spotlight and used the camera's manual focus option.

Since I was using a wide-angle (slight) lens, the f/8 aperture assured me that the background would also be in focus. To record the (apparent) movement of the stars (the real movement of the Earth), I took 26 consecutive 15-second exposures.

I aligned and superimposed all the images and obtained the result that I now present. I got worse results with prolonged exposures of several minutes. The atmosphere was very calm, with practically no wind, which allowed the pine tree to remain sharp in the final image (in these types of images, completely static objects such as buildings are generally used for the foreground to give scale to the image).

At least one plane passed through the sky, the track of which was recorded in the image with red dots. I kept the brightness of the final image low to reflect the environment I was in. I was delighted with the final result, which seemed to reflect well the tiny place that man and the Earth occupy in the Universe.