I would really encourage you to click on the image above to get a larger image view of this photo. I was over camped on the Quinault river and set up my camera on a tripod. I had a 21mm lens on my DSLR and an exposure of 15 seconds … a combination that lets you take some interesting night photos without having the stars turn into tracks.
The John Day area of Eastern Oregon has very dark skies with minimal light pollution. The star gazing is spectacular. I was down camping out a year or two back and took some time exposure shots with a Zeiss 21mm lens. I really liked the images at the time, but I recently revisited them and realized that I had not developed their full potential in Lightroom by removing as much noise as possible. I really liked the improvement, so here’s the resulting image.