With money saved from shoveling snow and cutting grass as a youngster, I bought my first camera: a used Kodak Vigilant  Junior Six-20  bellows camera and tripod so I could try my hand at shooting the nighttime sky.  And it wasn't long before I also built a complete basement darkroom in which to process and print the negatives.

This photo is perhaps my first effort―a few minutes exposure shot with the camera aimed toward Polaris, the North Star.  During the course of the night, all stars appear to wheel counterclockwise around the pole star and create star trails as their light registers on different portions of the film as the Earth and camera turn.  The Little Dipper extends from Polaris (on upper left center) down to the lower right; the brightest star just above the slanted rooftop is Kochab, the brightest of the Dipper's bowl.

On the lower left appears the roof of my childhood home, along with our TV antenna and power lines; on the right, the house of our neighbors, Mr. & Mrs. George Miller. Though we lived in a typical blue-collar East Coast Archie Bunker-style neighborhood about midway between Philadelphia and New York, the night sky at the time was fairly dark―at least dark enough to inspire my early interest in viewing and photographing the cosmos. 

●   Date:   circa mid-1960s
●   Photo details:   Kodak Vigilant  Junior Six-20  camera, Tri-X film
●   Processing details:   Noise Ninja 2.3.2, Photoshop CS2
●   Location:   Childhood backyard, Easton, Pennsylvania, USA