This was the first image I created by compositing a wide-field image of mine with a planetary image downloaded from a NASA web site. The image of the earth as it existed straight off NASA's server was pretty far off-color, dirty, and much lower resolution than I required for this image. About 3 hours of computer work was needed to color-correct, clean, and slowly interpolate the image up to the required resolution. (While the image on this web site is pretty small, I create my original work at high resolution and image the file to a Solitaire film recorder. Each image I create is approximately 28MB in size, suitable for film recording and print production.) Additional work in Photoshop was required to create the shadowed side of the planet, along with a lighting effect applied to create a gradual light falloff from the daylight side towards the night side. The background image is of the Winter Milky Way and was photographed from Los Alamos Lake State Park in the middle of nowhere, Arizona in March of 1997. It was taken using un-hypered Kodak 1000-speed color negative film with a Mamiya RB67 camera and 90mm lens. Exposure was 10 minutes @ f/4. The camera was piggybacked on my Celestron CG-11 telescope. The negative was scanned using a Linotype-Hell Saphir Ultra flatbed scanner, and the image was composited using Photoshop 4. Many of my friends tell me that this image makes our planet look lonely and isolated, which is how I imagine it must really look from a distance.