Starship Asterisk*

Mount Etna Milky Way

Explanation: A glow from the summit of Mount Etna, famous active stratovolcano of planet Earth, stands out along the horizon in this mountain and night skyscape. Bands of diffuse light from congeries of innumerable stars along the Milky Way galaxy stretch across the sky above. In silhouette, the Milky Way's massive dust clouds are clumped along the galactic plane. But also familiar to northern skygazers are bright stars Deneb, Vega, and Altair, the Summer Triangle straddling dark nebulae and luminous star clouds poised over the volcanic peak. The deep combined exposures also reveal the light of active star forming regions along the Milky Way, echoing Etna's ruddy hue in the northern hemisphere summer's night.

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The Summer Triangle I presume:

Do they night skies actually look like that? That visually distinguishable. I saw the Milky Way bar once but it didn't looked that distinctive, it was much fainter but still impressive.

beryllium732 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 05, 2024 10:56 pm Do they night skies actually look like that? That visually distinguishable. I saw the Milky Way bar once but it didn't looked that distinctive, it was much fainter but still impressive.

Nope. Our eyes aren't remotely that good. The process here is typical of nice looking detailed sky images, and entails "stacking" multiple long exposures (the automatic translation by my browser isn't perfect, but good enough):

The technique used to obtain this image was to shoot the same area of sky, at the same time, with two cameras (one of which was modified for astronomy) with the same focal length.

Landscape:

CANON EOS R
Lens 7 Artisans 14 mm. @f/4
N° 21 15 second exposures @ISO 6,400

Sky:

CANON EOS RA
SIGMA DG 14 mm lens. f/1.8 @f/3.2
N° 111 40 second exposures @ISO 6,400
DARK, NO FLAT
Optolong L-eNhance filter
IOPTRON SKY GUIDE PRO Star Tracker
SOFTWARE: Pixinsight, StarnetV2, Lightroom, Photoshop