JACKSON, Wyo. — Jake Mosher’s photograph of the Milky Way over the Tetons won gold in the 2022 World Nature Photography Awards’ Planet Earth’s landscapes and environments category.
The annual World Nature Photography Awards is an international contest “celebrating the world’s best nature photographers” across 14 distinct categories.
Mosher, a two-time winner of the National Wildlife Federation Photo Contest landscape category and full-time nature photographer based in Bozeman, Mont., started up Table Mountain on June 17, 2021, and snowshoed through deep snowpack for the last mile to set up camp and get his winning Teton shot.
According to Mosher, he started shooting a quarter after midnight. It took him roughly 30 minutes to shoot the three row panorama. He used the Nikon D850 and Sigma 35 mm art lens.
After six to seven years of astrophotography, the art of capturing photos of the night sky, Mosher had an idea of how the Milky Way would be situated in the Northern Hemisphere and knew the top of Table Mountain would be the perfect spot in early summer to get the arc of the galaxy over the Tetons.
“It’s a place that I wanted to save until I was fairly confident I could do it some amount of justice,” Mosher says of deciding to venture up there. “The combination of the iconic Tetons with a view that most people have never seen of them, and the perfect combination between clear skies and the airglow, made it all come together perfectly.”
To read more about astronomy, check out Buckrail’s news about the full moon this past week or the Webb Telescope images last year!
