09.08.2018

In the mountains there are much better conditions for star photography: you are “closer” to the stars, the air is much more clearer and I had the luck of a cloudless sky this night and as if that wasn't enough, the Milky Way was perfectly positioned above the valley. But the most important information is the fact, the panorama head was still at home. So we went back to the hotel and got the head and drove back to the place were we got this perfect view on the valley.

The technical part

The panorama is made of six exposures at 14 mm at f/2.8. The exposure time is 15 seconds at an ISO of 8000. Of course I used the Nikon D850 for this, this high ISO allowed my to capture a lot of stars. The stars became a little stretched because of the long exposure, but if you take this picture in a whole there is no sign for this “flaw”. The image has 242 megapixels and a resolution of 14821 x 5714.

The unstitiched panorama.

The editing took some time of course because I wanted a perfect result. The are a lot of partial adjustments and of course some use of the healing brush to get rid of the light trails from airplanes. There were buildings behind me which created a light source so I darkened these on left and on the right just to get the attention of the viewer to center of picture.

This time I used only Lightroom for this work, even the stitching. I didn't have to make any compromises in terms of handling or comfort, except for the usual slowness compared to Photoshop. So there is only one layer and all the amplify was made with the tools of Lightroom. If you want to know how to get this kind of shots and what you need for this read my guide for star photography here.

Thanks to the possibilities of the panorama photography shows this picture the sheer size of the night sky and the Milky Way band it contains. In my opinion, the dimensions will be very clear how tiny and fast moving our earth is.

The milky way band above Prägraten, East Tyrol in Austria.