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After shooting under the very dark skies of the US Southwest in April and May, it was time to head out for a shooting in my home country. I met up with Benjamin Barakat and Jens Mirwald in a small nature reserve in central Switzerland.

 

The place was the complete opposite to Death Valley, where I was photographing two weeks before: Cool, very humid and horribly light polluted.

 

When the first RAWs popped up on my LCD, I almost called it a night. The polluted skies and the humidity conspired to eat up all contrast in the sky and the Milky Way was almost invisible.

 

If the excellent results I had gotten lately made me feel like a Milky Way wizzard, this shooting definitely brought me back to reality. Time to put my technique to add narrowband data to my tracked exposures to test.

 

Processing the image proved to be much more difficult than my latest big panoramas and the result is - well, it is what it is.

 

The bottom line is that narrowband data help to bring out detail and color, but only to a certain degree. Despite all the technical progress, you still need dark skies for truely great results.

 

EXIF

Canon EOS R, astro-modified

Tamron 15-30mm f/2.8

IDAS NBZ filter

iOptron SkyTracker Pro

Sky:

Stack of 7x 60s @ ISO800, unfiltered & 5x 90s @ ISO6400, filtered

Foreground:

Stack of 5x 60s @ ISO3200

Done