Glimpsing the hidden highways of the night sky

It all started with fireflies. In the early 2010s, photographer Pete Mauney was at his home along the Hudson River, in the town of Tivoli, New York, and he had a simple but frustrating goal: to make the perfect image of the lightning bugs in his backyard. In his attempt to capture their frenetic, flickering, seemingly random flights, Mauney used a process borrowed from the art of astrophotography called image stacking. It’s essentially what an iPhone camera does on low-light mode when it blends a series of underexposed photographs together to negate the noise. It should have been straightforward. But as he opened his lenses to the night sky and undertook this collaborative effort between man and firefly (“albeit with my collaborator being unaware of it,” he jokes), he faced a persistent, vexing problem: What should he do about the annoying airplanes that kept getting in his pictures?

This problem, it turned out, was also a revelation. As a teenager in Montclair, New Jersey, Mauney would hike up the cliffs overlooking the town and watch the steady flow of airplanes coming in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport. He idly contemplated capturing the air traffic on film. “But I didn’t have money or technology or really anything at that point,” he says. Now, almost four decades later, with the tools and know-how, he realized he could return to that ridge and finally capture the stream of planes.

These days, planes are nearly as common in the sky as stars. After a brief dip in air travel during the pandemic, the numbers of passengers and flights have bounced back to record-setting highs, with more people than ever soaring through the clouds. At one point in July 2024, nearly 15,000 passenger planes were in the sky at once—and that’s not even counting all the single-engine aircraft, helicopters, drones, military jets, and so on. But with the naked eye, we generally see just one at a time cutting through the clouds, thousands of feet overhead.

To turn this scattered, scarcely visible traffic into dramatic tracings of light, Mauney stations his camouflaged cameras on tripods in set positions for hours and captures hundreds or even thousands of exposures, later stacking the images in postproduction to create a single shot. Some images reveal traffic patterns, with bending bands from aircraft all taking the same departure route before veering toward their destinations. Others, such as those with the occasional Christmassy streaks of green, white, and red, show physical navigational tools pilots still rely on in the digital age—green lights always shine on the starboard wing, red lights on the port side, and a white taillight on the rear. Then there are the images where straight bands from arriving airplanes converge with the curved orbits of stars.

The lengthy nocturnal stretches make the work possible but also significantly trickier. While one might think airplanes would behave with a certain level of predictability and rhythm, Mauney notes that with long-exposure shots, just about anything can go wrong. To his eye, part of the appeal is that “I don’t control the subject matter,” he says. Air traffic controllers may change active runways because of strong wind gusts, or a curious law enforcement officer might stop by to ask some questions about what exactly Mauney’s up to. But for Mauney, it’s all a worthy part of his effort “to turn what I see as chaos into some form of order.”