Milky Way over Troll's Tongue
Image Credit & Copyright:
Ruslan Merzlyakov
(RMS Photography)
You have to take a
long hike to see the Troll's Tongue -- ten hours over rocky terrain.
And in this case, it took three trips to capture the
landform below a clear night sky.
Trolltunga itself is a
picturesque rock protrusion
extending about 700 meters over mountainous cliffs near
Lake Ringedalsvatnet in
Norway.
The overhang is made of billion-year-old
Precambrian
bedrock that was carved out by glaciers during an ice-age about 10,000 years ago.
The featured picture is a composite of two exposures, a 15-second image of the
foreground
Earth
followed 40 minutes later by an 87-second exposure of the
background sky.
Thousands of discernable stars dot the backdrop
starscape
in addition to billions of
unresolved stars in the nearly vertical
band of our Milky Way Galaxy.