Stars

One of the cool things about Hawaii was that there wasn't much light pollution, so sitting on the deck at night you could really see all the stars and the Milky Way.

I played around with my camera some trying to take pictures of the sky, but I don't really have a fast enough lens to really do a great job -- if your lens isn't fast (that is, gathers a lot of light and generally lets you use faster shutter speeds), you end up having to take long exposures and stars move surprisingly fast, so you end up with streaks rather than points of light.

So, what a lot of people do is take a bunch of shorter exposures (so the stars are dots rather than streaks), stack them on top of each other, and line them up. In low-light situations you generally have your ISO (effectively the sensor amplification) set pretty high on your camera, so you end up with kind of noisy pictures, and stacking pictures not only amplifies the stars but also amplifies the noise. So you're trying to strike a balance between shutter speed, ISO, and actually getting the sky to show up in your photo fairly well.

Anyways, I gave it a couple shots and ended up with one picture that turned out pretty well, all things considered: