Hunter in the Desert

A few years ago, I captured this little arch in the Californian desert during the Milky Way core season, but I have never seen any images from this place with the Winter Milky Way.

 

During my last Los Angeles layover, the moon phase was less than perfect for astrophotography. I however found that there was a short time window before moonrise, when Orion started showing above the arch and I decided to give it a try.

 

Thanks to the good sky quality, the red Hydrogen emission nebulae show very well, despite being close to the horizon. Rosette Nebula is peeking through the arch and on its right you can see part of Barnard's Loop, the Flame and Horsehead Nebula, Orion Nebula and hint if the faint Witchhead Nebula, a reflection nebula above the bright star Riegel. The Winter Milky Way with the huge Meissa Nebula, the Flaming Star Nebula and the California Nebula extends above the arch. The open clusters Hyades and Pleiades complete this tour of deep space wonders.

 

I was surprised to see how dense the air traffic was over this remote location. Several aircraft were criss-crossing through every single exposure and I therefore captured a higher number of exposures than I normally do for landscape astrophotography. Stacking them with a good rejection algorithm not only makes the image look very clean, it also got rid of the ugly aircraft trails.

 

EXIF

Canon EOS Ra

Canon EOS 6D, astro-modified

Sigma 28mm f/1.4

iOptron SkyTracker Pro

Sky:

2 panel panorama, each 20x 60s @ ISO1600, f/2 with the EOS 6D

Foreground:

Focus stack of 6x 25s @ f/8 during twilight with EOS Ra.

Done