A dance of fireflies under the milky way!

Great Smoky Mountains National Park hosts synchronous firefly viewing at Elkmont Nature Trail, accessed through a lottery system to limit crowd size. Despite applying for several years, I didn't win the lottery. This year, I chose to view the fireflies from a different location: Cades Cove. Although the fireflies weren't synchronous, they were large in numbers. While the concentration of synchronous fireflies is higher near Elkmont, the view from Cades Cove was still spectacular, allowing me to capture the fireflies with the Milky Way glimmering above.

Equipments: Nikon Z8 using Nikkor 14-24mm.
Exposure: 15s at f/2.8; ISO 6400

Post Processing: Multiple images were stacked to reduce noise in the sky, and several long-exposure shots of the fireflies were combined into single frame using Lightroom and photoshop.