Recently, I was watching Japanese television with my wife and daughter, and there was a program talking about how towns in Japan which were in danger of becoming ghost towns had revived themselves. One of the towns was Minami Shinshu in Nagano Prefcture, about a two and a half hour drive from where we live in Aichi Prefecture. The country town had been shrinking steadily, as young people tend to leave the country for the big cities, and had become one of the darkest areas in Honshu, so the town decided to make that a selling point, as the night sky is among the best in Japan. As we were listening to the TV show, my wife immediately got on the internet to see if we could find a campground in the area to visit during Golden Week. She found one called Ginga Momiji Campground with lodges and quickly booked it for a night. My wife's sister joined us and we enjoyed the outdoors for two days. I was really looking forward to trying to get some star photos. There were a lot of stars in the sky, but unfortunately, there were still lights on here and there, cars driving into the campground after dark etc. With a long exposure (20 to 30 seconds for most of mine), ANY light gets magnified, so I couldn't get photos like I might in the desert, and it is too early in the year to photograph the Milky Way, but I got a couple I was pleased with. For the photo with an aspen tree in the foreground, I shone my headlamp on the white bark of the tree for about five seconds to make it stand out a bit more.