Looking south, out the Naftan Cave, toward Tinian. The yellow lights to the left are likely lights of a small village community (maybe Marpo Heights?). The white lights to the right are on the Voice of America Broadcasting towers.

The moon was behind me (which is why you have some illumination on the foreground walls). This is a composite of 7 photos, ranging in exposure from 1 minute to 20 minutes, and combined in a way to enhance range of exposure ("dynamic range," to use the official terminology). For those of you who are familiar with High Dynamic Range programs, I prefer to do it manually.

To give you some idea of the dedication (idiocy?) required to do such night photography: Consider that this one photograph probably required about 45 minutes or so of total exposure time for all the individual shots. My camera has a noise-reduction feature which "exposes" the sensor (with the shutter closed) for an equal amount of time after the shot is taken (and then uses that information to cancel out some of the noise {"grain"} which is inherent in long and under-exposed photographs. So, ignoring the time to get there and set up, this one picture you see required about 90 minutes of camera exposure time. Of course, that is also ignoring the Photoshop time in combining the individual shots.

But, it is a lot of fun, too! Amazing how much color is there, if the exposure is long enough (I could not see any of this color that night, except for the yellow cast of the lights to the left)!