Frosty Spring Milky Way

Spring’s first heartbeat honors Winter’s last breath. -Angie Weiland-Crosby

I had just finished a night photographing the Milky Way at a local wetland park. As blue hour began, I decided to stop at this wetland boardwalk park right near home.

This particular park is closed over night for hunting, and the opening time lined up perfectly for me to get one foreground image to blend with the sky photos I had just taken down the road.

This image is an example of why composites are not cheating, but just another form of art. The sky image is from the same area, but I didn’t have the same access to this exact park during the time the Milky Way was in the sky.

Siebenthaler Fen is a wildlife park with a boardwalk. A great place to learn about and enjoy the surrounding wetland life. This image is a composite of a sky from a nearby park (also within the same wetland park system) and a morning blue hour foreground, right before sunrise on the first day of spring in 2023. It was a frosty dark walk to the bridge over the water. I saw raccoon footprints left on the frost covered boardwalk, and a beaver or muskrat swimming home after a night of foraging. The walk out in the rising sun offered bird songs and a first glimpse of spring.

  • raccoon prints on the frosty boardwalk

  • wetlands at blue hour

  • snapshot of my foreground

  • the wetlands as at sunrise

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Walking back along the boardwalk in the rising sun, listening to the singing birds, and breathing in the clean spring air made me feel refreshed and ready for Spring. I took my dog, Rey, right back there for a frosty morning hike.

birds welcoming spring

This image was also selected for the January page of the Wetlands Association’s calendar the following year.