But when Lana Young first saw her photograph of the night sky above the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research’s (Niwa) Atmospheric Research Station, in Lauder, she was left "disappointed".
The Niwa visual content producer spent more than an hour capturing the single photo, which is a composite of 30-second time-lapse exposures taken over a 55-minute period.
When she went to look at the photo on the screen of her camera, the resolution was low and the stars did not show up, she said.
"It just looked like a photo of blackness to me. It was disappointing.
"But when I processed it on the computer and put all the images together, the lines from the stars started to appear and I was like, ‘Oh wow, you can actually see the stars’."
It captures the Earth’s rotation, which gives the impression the stars are swirling in a circular motion, she said.
"It was way better than I ever thought it would be.
"We were joking in the office that it looks like the start of an episode of Dr Who."
She was delighted with the end result because it was actually her first attempt at taking a long exposure photo like this, Ms Young said.
She used a Sony A7R4 camera on a tripod pointed towards the South Celestial Pole, with an aperture setting of 2.8, a 30-second shutter speed and a 100 ISO setting.
She hoped it would be selected for Niwa’s annual calendar.
