The Impressionistic Tracings of Airplane Lights at Night

Pete Mauney stiches hundreds of photographs together to create these poetic, nocturnal renderings.

Every day, airplanes make 43,000 trips through United States airspace, each beginning or ending at one of the nation's 19,000 or so airports. It's a rhythmic stream of departures and arrivals so regular as to seem rote, yet it never fails to mesmerize Pete Mauney. Over the past two years, Mauney has spent an inordinate number of evenings photographing aircraft taking off and landing, their flashing lights weaving gold webbed patterns through the sky.

"I'm totally obsessed," he says.

That obsession began six years ago with something else that flies and flashes: lightning bugs. After reading an online tutorial, Mauney began taking long exposure photographs of the insects buzzing and blinking around his backyard in Tivoli, New York. To his surprise, in the backgrounds of many of those images were airplanes—machines that have dazzled Mauney since high school, when he'd sit on some cliffs near his parents' home in New Jersey getting stoned and watching them fly. He realized he could easily apply his technique for shooting fireflies to their bigger, metal counterparts. "I had an 'Oh shit, I wonder what would happen if ...' moment," he says.

Now he photographs airplanes in the middle of winter, when fireflies are hibernating and there's an extra hour of darkness, letting him squeeze in a few more shots before the last flights of the day touch ground. It's tough work: Each shooting session involves four to six hours of driving and just as many tinkering with his cameras out in the crippling cold. "I find it extraordinarily unpleasant, but absolutely thrilling at the same time," he says.

Mauney scouts locationss on Google Maps and flight data apps. They often take him to sketchy areas like the Meadowlands, a swamp once teeming with dead mobsters and toxic waste, but that now offers Mauney compelling views of plane traffic in and out of Newark airport. He cuts a peculiar figure out there: a middle-aged white dude with a gnome-like beard and spectacles, wearing a Day-Glo yellow jacket and reflective tape, placing traffic cones around his photo gear so no one runs into it—or him. "I really don't want to leave this world getting liquidated by a FedEx truck," he says.

He works with three DSLRs mounted on heavy-duty tripodss, weighed down with several 15-pound bags of lead shot to prevent them from shaking in the wind. Each camera captures hundreds of images over the course of several hours, its shutter opening and closing for intervals of time ranging between 5 and 30 seconds. Later, in Photoshop, Mauney combines anywhere from 50 to 1,200 images (all taken in succession by the same camera) to form composites representing up to a couple hours of takeoffs and landings.

What you get are impressionistic trails of light— poetic, nocturnal renderings of flight that remind you how incredible it is. "An airplane is a marvel of engineering," Mauney says. "I just find them really, really, really beautiful—to see these weaving shimmers of light going through an image and think, 'My God, I can't believe that those happened, and I witnessed it, and then this other thing came out of it.'"

Images from Airplane will be on display at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts in Woodstock, New York, from July 5 to August 18.

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