Among the many wonders of the celestial world is the annual appearance of the Milky Way in the heavens above. This missive collection of billions of stars, of which our sun is one, is wrapped around our small solar system in such a way that at certain times of the year large parts of it are visible. In the northern hemisphere, the early summer is a peak time for such an appearance.
Largely invisible to the naked eye, the Milky Way appears as a dim, slightly milky streak, first across the southeastern sky and rotating westward as the night progresses. But what the average viewer will miss seeing draws photographers into the nighttime to capture its beauty.
Digital photography techniques permit the creation of exciting photos of the Milky Way, but photographing it is no simple or straightforward process. Finding a good location is the first necessity. In our modern world, light pollution spilling out from cities and towns travels not just tens but hundreds of miles, obscuring celestial objects and leaving behind a golden band at the level of the horizon.
Second is making many photos of the night sky, to be later “stacked” in post-processing to accentuate the brilliance of the component stars. Special equipment—fast wide-angle lenses, sturdy tripods, and the like—are all a part of the essential gear needed to create these images.
Studying the process for photographing and processing Milky Way photos is also a necessity. Numerous books have been published on the subject. In addition, many YouTube and several on-line courses that provide excellent advice and instruction. Special phone apps have been created to help with planning the best times and locations for Milky Way shots, some of which even display the projected positioning of the Milky Way against a live image of the site from which you propose to photograph.
Finding a good location, with minimal light pollution, at the optimal season, the right time of night, under cloudless and moonless conditions—these are all necessary conditions to create successful images of the Milky Way.
But making photos of the sky is only half of the story. The rest of the tale is told in the digital darkroom—at the computer—where special software is used to combine the stacks of individual images and, if a panorama was created, to stitch together the component elements into a single, continuous whole.
In the end, making successful photos of the Milky Way takes preparation, planning, plenty of time, and good luck.
My friend Jeff Fleisher and I recently made a series of photos from Virginia’s Skyline Drive, which offers a high viewpoint as far from light pollution as one can get in this part of the country. We spent one day scouting potential sites during daylight so we could see where we’d be going when conditions were dark. Even so, I later tripped and fell in the dark, pointing up one of the hazards of Milky Way photography. In our planning, we were aided by using a phone app called PhotoPills that let us project where the galactic center—the point of most interest and beauty—would lie in the sky on the date with the least confounding moonlight. Then, on the first night with a clear sky we spent several hours making images to be processed on returning home.
The photo presented here is one example of what I was able to capture on that night. Post-processing these images is a time-consuming task, so I’ve got more work yet to do. In the meantime, I hope you like this image.