Candy and I had gone down to the Powder Mill Campground near Ellington, MO. In the middle of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways. It has dark enough skies to readily see the Milky Way.
The night was so wet (way beyond humid) that there was water condensation all over everything, including my camera lens. I clicked the shutter once and gave up on the camera for the night, sure that I had nothing worth looking at.
I was wrong.
I caught something unusual. Because of the condensation on the front of my lens, the stars have halos around them. The halos are large enough to make the colors of the stars readily visible; some are blue, some orange, some yellow, some white. We do not get to see these colors very often with our bare eyes for two reasons. First, there is so much light pollution in our cities and suburbs that we see very few stars. Second, our eyes are not sensitive enough to light to pick up much color in the dark. But the camera can, and did, get all of the color.
You can see the whole image better (and download it) in my online photo gallery.
In this tighter crop, I have labeled three of the stars with their temperatures in degrees Kelvin.
I shot this with my Nikon on a tripod. In the 30 seconds that the shutter was open, the Earth rotated enough to make the stars look like short horizontal stripes instead of points.
- July 13, 2026 at 10:55pm
- Nikon Z 7ii
- Nikkor Z 14-30 F/4 S at 14mm
- 1 exposure, 30 seconds, F/4, ISO 3200
- Raw image post-processed in darktable
Beautiful!