Tre Cime – Guardians of the Milky Way

The Long Road to My Photo at the Tre Cime di Lavaredo

Now comes a long story about how this photo came to be.

One and a half years ago, the idea was born. When I once again happened to see this extraordinary landscape – the Tre Cime di Lavaredo – in a documentary about the Dolomites, I was spellbound. Since my passion has always been night photography, it quickly became clear: this was the place where I wanted to capture the Milky Way. Although I had been doing deep-sky photography for more than ten years, I had never photographed the Milky Way itself. This would mark the beginning of a new passion.

At such a breathtaking location, I didn’t want to simply “take a picture” – my goal was far more ambitious: to create one of the finest Milky Way photographs to be found anywhere in the world. Admittedly, not a modest ambition… but once you stand before this scenery, you instantly understand why someone suddenly feels the urge to reach for the stars.

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Planning and Technology

So the planning began. I needed a highly precise yet mobile and lightweight star tracker. It quickly became clear: with stacking and only 8-second exposures – meaning without tracking – combined with extremely high ISO values, I would never reach the image quality I was aiming for.

So I practiced again and again with the tracker under the light-polluted skies of my hometown: how does it react to wind? What happens with high humidity, thin clouds, or turbulence in the upper atmosphere? Every small disturbance worsens the “seeing,” and it takes a lot of experience to master these pitfalls.

Even calibrating the tracker has to be extremely precise. I measure my tripod digitally in steps of 0.1 degrees to ensure it is perfectly level – the more exact, the longer you can track. Of course, there are superb mounts available, but they are anything but portable. You don’t carry a 20-kilogram block in your backpack up to 2,600 meters on a night hike, together with all the other gear.

And then, of course, you need the brightest and sharpest lenses available. At night, every fraction of a stop counts – daylight photography is far more forgiving.

In general: the less artificial light, the clearer and more majestic the Milky Way appears. For deep-sky astrophotography, there are special filters that block man-made light pollution (for example, from cities). But the Milky Way is something entirely different: it shines across the full spectrum – from deep red to violet-blue. No filter trick works here. Any filter would also block starlight. In other words: the only “trick” is no trick at all – you simply need the darkest, most pristine skies possible.

In Europe, you can only find such conditions in a handful of places: the Dolomites, Großglockner, or La Palma (Canary Islands) – the best you can get by European standards. There are a few more, but the weather there is so unpredictable that your chances of success are even lower. The ideal is high altitude with dry, crystal-clear air.

If you want to go even further, travel to Namibia. There you’ll experience one of the most spectacular night skies anywhere: no weather problems, almost every night is perfect. The catch? Malaria. Which means daily prophylaxis with all its side effects. There’s always something, isn’t there?

If you want to get a sense yourself: on lightpollutionmap.info you can view worldwide light pollution interactively. Just one glance shows how rare truly dark places on our planet have become.

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Milky Way Time Window

In Europe, the Milky Way can only be photographed between April and the end of August during new moon. But especially in June and July, the nights are too short and too bright – it never gets completely dark at our latitude. Effectively, there are only about three months, with a small time window of just a few days around each new moon. If the weather doesn’t cooperate, you wait until the next month.

In summer, you can look towards the center of our galaxy and see the striking dust and nebula bands. In winter, however, you’re looking “outward” into the universe – without those spectacular structures. The season is extremely short, and the chance of a cloudless sky in the Dolomites is less than 30%. The weather often remains stable for only 3–4 hours before changing – a true lottery.

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Tre Cime: A Dream Location with Obstacles

Even during the day, at around 2,500 meters, it is breathtakingly beautiful – wherever you look, a picture-book landscape opens up. And then, right before you, the Tre Cime rise: massive rock walls soaring almost 500 meters straight up, touching the 3,000-meter mark.

But getting there is no longer so simple: you need a reservation and a ticket. Your license plate is checked already down in the valley.

The tickets are strictly limited. For our campervan, 12 hours cost €60. But the probability of stable, cloud-free weather up there is less than 30% – with just one ticket, my project would have been impossible. So I booked 6 time slots of 12 hours each, back-to-back.

Not so easy: the tickets have to connect seamlessly, with only a handful of vehicles allowed per hour. If one slot ends at, say, 4 p.m. and the next one is fully booked, you’re simply out of luck. Getting even one slot is difficult – arranging six in a row is almost impossible. And at the barrier in the valley, there is zero tolerance: even a second late at exit, and the fine is guaranteed.

For the booking itself, you get just five minutes – starting the moment you open the system, not with your final click. From finding matching slots to entering credit card details, personal data, and vehicle info, the countdown runs relentlessly. Everything that could be complicated, is complicated – as if the Dolomites didn’t already present enough natural challenges.

And as if that weren’t enough, you can only buy six tickets per month – now reduced to five.

Going up spontaneously? Forget it. Even if a slot were free, you must book digitally at least 24 hours in advance. On site or the same day? Impossible, not allowed. If you think you can just go with the weather – no chance. Here, bureaucracy rules over nature.

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Arrival and First Setbacks

One and a half years later, the time finally came. Before the drive up, we prepared our campervan: fridge filled, toilet emptied, all batteries charged – for camera, smartphone, star tracker, heating bands against dew, and countless lamps. We were ready to last three days and nights up there.

But even if you arrive early at the barrier full of anticipation, you won’t be let in – the gates only open at the exact booked time. Then it was up in second gear, carefully winding through the serpentines. Now and then the front wheels slipped on the wet asphalt – a clear sign of just how steep it was. A motorhome weighing over four tons and 7.5 meters long is no off-roader. But at the top, on one of the highest campsites in Europe, everything was set.

Only problem: the fridge decided that at 2,500 meters it was no longer its job – even though we had filled it to the brim beforehand. Absorption fridges in RVs simply don’t work reliably on gas at this altitude. Another hard-learned lesson. Result: half of our food ended up in the trash.

The first two days: rain, wind, dense fog, temperatures around 4°C. Thanks to the heater in the camper, at least the cold was bearable – but photographically, a frustration. On the last day, though, everything changed: sunshine, clear views, amazing mood. Could it finally work out?

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The Night of the Shoot

The hike with a backpack weighing over 12 kilos was tougher than expected – the thin air made itself felt.

That night, countless shots were taken. Many tracked 6-minute exposures of the Milky Way, which I later stacked to further improve the signal-to-noise ratio – a trick to achieve more quality than the sensor alone could deliver. I also captured the landscape separately – since with tracked stars, the foreground would blur.

And here came the next challenge: Milky Way photos require new moon and absolute darkness. Landscapes, however, look flat and monochromatic under such conditions, whereas full moon would provide plastic light. The solution: capture the landscape during blue hour or light it deliberately.

For that, I had a special lamp built – custom-made down to the last detail. I even chose the exact LED type myself, tailored precisely to my requirements for color temperature and light quality. 99% of ordinary flashlights are useless for high-quality photography: the light is usually far too cold, or the CRI index (color rendering) is too poor.

My lamp also has a zoom: the beam can be focused extremely tightly – up to 1.5 kilometers – or spread wide and soft, depending on what’s needed for light painting.

And the surprising part: from manufacturers like Convoy Flashlight in China, you can get such customized lamps for under €30. In Germany, such a service would hardly exist – and if it did, the price would make you swallow hard.

So I created exposures of up to 15 minutes while painting the rocks with light. Sometimes the right side turned out better, sometimes the left. A single perfect shot is impossible.

And then there are the famous headlamp trails – little light streaks from hikers that often give an image that extra something. The problem: at night, hardly anyone is up there. And if they are, it’s guaranteed not at the exact moment you’d need them in frame. Paradoxical, isn’t it? You want them desperately – but almost never get them when you need them. So the only option is to collect separate exposures whenever someone happens to pass.

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The Puzzle

By the end of the night, I had about 30 shots in the bag – and darkness gave way to morning. Among them: long exposures with light painting, shots with headlamp trails, many tracked Milky Way frames, and landscapes from blue hour to deep night.

That was my raw material, my toolkit. Later I selected the best elements and merged them into a single image – like a painter who first collects sketches and then fuses them into a finished work of art.

This is the supreme discipline of photography: absolutely no fake, but impossible to achieve in a single exposure. Each frame had to be carefully developed – matching white balance and color temperatures, adjusting brightness and contrast, reducing noise, enhancing details. Sometimes the foreground stone looked better illuminated on the left, sometimes on the right. Everything had to be precisely assembled, layer by layer.

In the end, the Photoshop file grew to over a hundred layers and more than 60 gigabytes. Every little adjustment had to be carefully considered, since each change affected the entire image. The greatest challenge: blending all these different exposures into a seamless whole, without visible transitions, without an artificial impression.

To outsiders, the finished photo may look obvious – as if you had simply stood there and captured that exact moment. In reality, it meant days of work, hours of meticulous corrections, and an enormous amount of patience and technical precision.

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Conclusion

Moments like these stay with you for a lifetime. Not just the photo itself, but the entire journey: the long preparation, the struggles, the setbacks, and finally, the success.

It’s also important to me to show with such texts that photography is not just a click. It’s an adventure – a battle with nature, technology, and yourself. Again and again, I try to surpass my previous limits. Each step makes it harder – but when it works, the moments of joy are unforgettable.

And for those who know me – of course, the next ideas are already in preparation.

Enjoy the view!

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Making of – did you know?

With night photography something curious happens: when viewed in daylight or against a bright background, the deepest shadows often “stick together,” making the landscape look darker than it really is.

The trick is not to leave black at absolute zero, but to raise it ever so slightly – the sweet spot is around 2–3 out of 255 brightness levels. This way, fine structures remain visible even in bright surroundings.

It’s the same little secret used by film and streaming studios to keep images stable across every kind of screen.

As you can see – nothing here is left to chance.

 

Scientific Sweet Spot for Night Photos

To balance depth and readability across all devices, researchers and industry standards recommend placing the darkest tones in a narrow “sweet spot.” My photo was fine-tuned exactly to these values:

 

Percentile (how many pixels are darker)Recommended rangeScientific midpointMy photo

5% darkest pixels2–3 / 255~2.5 / 2553

25% darkest pixels6–10 / 255~8 / 2558

Median (50% of all pixels)12–20 / 255~16 / 25515–16

 

How to read this:

The percentile tells you what fraction of pixels are darker than a certain brightness.

 

Example: “5% darkest pixels = 3” means the very darkest areas are not pitch black, but lifted just enough to remain visible.

 

The goal: sit right at the scientific midpoint, so the photo works equally well on OLED at night and on laptops or phones in bright daylight.

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🔧 Technical Information

📷 Camera: Sony Alpha 7R V

🔭 Lens: Sony FE 14 mm f/1.8 GM

 

🗻 Mount: Benro Cyanbird Carbon Tripod + Benro Polaris Astro Tracker

🌌 Sky: stack of 10 tracked exposures

️ Foreground: composite of 20 exposures (blue hour, light painting, headlamp trails, deep night phases)

 

⏱️ Exposure time per frame:

– Sky: ISO 320, f/1.8, 6 minutes each

– Foreground: ISO 100, f/2.8, from a few minutes (blue hour) up to 20 minutes

 

🕒 Total exposure time: approx. 6 hours combined

📍 Location: Tre Cime di Lavaredo (Drei Zinnen, 2,999 m), Dolomites, Italy

 

Done