The milky way taken with a moderate wide angle lens look directly up. The stars towards the top right are blurred as the camera was on a fixed tripod. The stars appear to move around a point in the northern sky near the pole star which is just out of shot bottem left. I'd need to use a motorized tracking mount to get rid of the blur. It's amazing to think how far the light from the Andromeda Galaxy (marked M31) has travelled. 2.5 Million light years. When the light I photographed here started it's journey, mankind was still busy evolving from what would best be described as an upright walking chimp. If you compress that time down to what we'd think of as a long journey, say, a 7.5 hour flight from London to New York, modern man doesn't appear until half an hour before landing. With 4 seconds to landing, Newton invents the reflecting Telescope. With 1.6 second to go photography is invented followed 0.4 seconds later by the mass market Box Brownie. Just in time with less than a tenth of a second 'til touchdown, digital photography comes along, I buy a 20D stick it on a tripod and open the shutter...

from PotD