Photographing at Woods Hole last night. I put my tripod on a wooden dock across Eel pond from these buildings while it was still light outside. My plan was to take pictures of the scene as the sun set and the sky darkened without moving the camera so that I would have a series of images identical in content but different in ambient light. I thought I could then blend the photographs together in photoshop to create an image that would reveal stars and buildings at the same time. It was a reasonable plan, but very few stars ever appeared in the sky behind the buildings because the light from the buildings washed-out the view of the sky.
Isn't it interesting how we still talk in terms of the sun "rising" and "setting", which implies that we continue to think of ourselves as being at the center of the solar system and the universe. It's human nature, I guess, to believe that everything is about us and for us.
Of course, the reason the sun appears to rise and set is that Earth is rotating on its axis as it orbits around the sun. It does look as if the sun and the stars and the moon go around us from our perspective on the ground. The fact that the moon really does go around us only adds to the confusion. It's impossible not to be astonished when thinking about how much people have figured out about nature.
Monte