2022-09-02 Milky Way

A quick and unplanned shoot where I just happened to have my camera with me on a clear night. I didn't even have my tripod with me, so the image was taken straight up with the camera lying on the ground. Fortunately, during fall in Norway, this means capturing the Milky Way.

Probably the hardest image to process so far. It took quite a while to find the right balance of light-polution subtraction, nebulae highlight and deep blacks. No individual parts of the image has been edited.

There is a color shift from red to blue towards the outer rim of the image. I assume it is caused by aberrations from my slight off-focus and very cheap lens. No combination of RawTherapee settings had any effect on this, so I just left it for future reference. I don't want to edit specific parts like that.

Now if you look closer at what's there, a lot is going on even though I missed Deneb and the North America Nebula by an hour or so. The most obvious feature is the dark dust-clouds, but one can see all kinds of nebulae and other DSOs.

I have included the B-V Index of a few stars for color reference.

Values were found using Stellarium.

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