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PITTSBURGH (AP) — The night sky at Mount Rainier National Park in Washington is often photogenic: wide and dark and full of bright stars. Add to that firmament the Northern Lights and a guy with the time to get it right and you have the makings of a photograph worthy of a postage stamp. That's just what the National Park Service thought when it saw a photograph — actually, a compilation of 200 photographs — taken by North Hills native Matt Dieterich, a graduate of both Robert Morris University and the University of Pittsburgh, who was working at Mount Rainier last summer. The Mount Rainier stamp featuring Dieterich's photographic stylings is the 13th of 16 Forever stamps the U.S. Postal Service is releasing later this year to commemorate the National Park Service's 100th anniversary. Dieterich, who began taking pictures of stars and the night sky shortly after getting a telescope 10 years ago, when he was in 10th grade, was working in June 2015 as an astronomy education ranger intern at Rainier when he noticed an "aurora" around the mountain. "We were doing a night sky program for the public when I saw some pink color on the horizon, a signal that the Northern Lights were happening," said Dieterich, who grew up in Ross. "I grabbed my equipment and drove a couple of miles down the road to Reflection Lake. I like to take night photos away from roads and near water where I can get stars reflected. This spot had all those elements, plus the Northern Lights." He set up his camera, a Nikon D750 with a 24 millimeter wide-angle lens, on a tripod, and programmed it to snap pictures, each with an eight-second exposure, in a two-hour window between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.. "Since the Earth is rotating, each exposure shows stars in slightly different locations," he said. "When the photos are combined into one image the stars create a circular pattern around the North Star, which is just out of view at the top of the image. The pink aurora spread through the background sky." The photo even captured the headlight trail of mountaineers climbing along the right edge of the Mount Rainier volcano. Dieterich said it was "serendipity" that the photo made it onto the stamp. An email he received said the park service was looking for photos of Mount Rainier that showed people looking through telescopes at the mountain. He didn't have any of those for which he had releases from the people pictured, so he sent in a link to his Mount Rainier photo gallery instead. "I figured I'd just let them pick if they liked something and within hours they got back to me and said they wanted the picture," he said. "They were on a tight deadline." The National Parks Forever Stamps' first-day-of-issue ceremony for the 16 stamp "pane" containing Dieterich's Mount Rainier star trails is scheduled for June 2 at the World Stamp Show-NY 2016, in New York City. The once-a-decade stamp show is the world's largest gathering of philatelists. Stamp release ceremonies will also take place at or near each of the 16 national park sites depicted on the stamps. Other National Parks Forever stamps previewed to date include Acadia National Park, Arches National Park, Assateague Island National Seashore, Bandelier National Monument, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, Everglades National Park, Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Grand Canyon National Park, Gulf Islands National Seashore, Haleakala National Park, Kenilworth Park & Aquatic Gardens and Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park. ___ Other photos and a video depicting the creation of the photo used for the stamp are at http://?www.mdieterichphoto.com/ __ Online: http://goo.gl/uvaFM0 ___ Information from: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, http://www.post-gazette.com

Local photographer's Mt. Rainier shot to be on stamp