This is from our camp in Brant Lake New York in the Adirondack Mountains. We vacation here every year and every year I've made kind of a tradition of doing a star trail photo. The Adirondack's have some of the best night skies on the east coast. This is from this past summer.

I wasn't sure this was going to work as clouds rolled in about halfway through the night. But I had a little over 200 clean photos for the star trails so I was able to make it work.

I set up during blue hour just before dark and took a few shots for the ground. The foreground shot (everything but the sky) was shot at f/8 iso 500. Once it was dark enough I put my camera in interval mode taking 15 second exposures at f/2.8 iso 2000.

I put the star trail photo together using the lighten blend mode in photoshop. Then blended in the star trail sky into my sharper lower iso blue hour shot using a gradient tool. This also had the added bonus of getting rid of some obnoxious lights that were on when it got dark.