Milky Way in Teletubbie Land

In July I went with to this stunning place in central Switzerland to capture Comet Neowise. After finishing the comet shots, we moved to this nearby spot to for a Milky Way nightscape.

 

I had to move my tripod a few times until I was happy with my placemet of the small grass road as a leading line into the image.

 

When I was happy with my composition, I aligned my tracking mount. As usual, this only took a few minutes, but when I turned back south, I realized that a massive cloud bank had moved in and blocked the entire lower part of the sky, including the Milky Way core.

 

I hoped that the clouds would disappear as quickly as they had moved in. I took my foreground exposures, but unfortunately, the clouds stayed longer. When they finally moved away, the Milky Way core was already hidden behind the hill on the right. I still shot my tracked sky then, but I do not like it as much as the Milky Way core I had captured with my maximum ISO test shots for framing.

 

I therefore tried to stack my 5 framing shots, but as I had moved the tripod a few feet between the exposures, my usual stacking programs failed miserably. As a last resort, I tried PixInsight and to my pleasant surprise, this powerful program did an excellent job stacking the files. After some further processing in Photoshop, I am quite happy with the result, considering it was shot with 8 years old technology at a crazy ISO 25'600. It is definately not perfect, but will have to do until I can revisit the place next year.

 

EXIF

Canon EOS 6D astro modified

Samyang 24mm f/1.4

Sky:

5 x 2.5s @ ISO25600, f/2

Foreground:

10 x 60s @ ISO3200

Done