Spent Saturday night in Algonquin Park shooting the Milky Way. I started around midnight and after about three hours, I forced myself to call it quits and get some sleep. The conditions were ideal: no clouds, no moon, low humidity, and I was in an area where there is little to no light pollution.
When most people talk about “seeing the Milky Way”, they are talking about the core of the galaxy. Located in the constellation Sagittarius, this is the brightest part of the Milky Way. Dust lanes, nebulas, and star clusters are all more concentrated in this area. It is located just above the horizon in my photo.
This image was captured around 2:30 in the morning, taken at the Lake of Two Rivers. I used an equatorial mount, which allows me to extend the exposure to 5 minutes. This gives me pinpoint sharp stars and more time to capture light while using a lower ISO setting reducing the level of background noise (or graininess) in the photo. (BTW, the brightest light in the photo is the planet Jupiter.)
A long exposure from a camera will pick up more stars and colors than the human eye can. However, many of the pictures you see on the internet have been subject to a significant amount of post camera processing, making the Milky Way look much brighter and much more colorful than what the camera records. I have chosen to keep my photos true to the original and apply only very small adjustments to sharpness and contrast.
This is my third season of photographing the universe and I keep learning ways to make the images better. Capturing a good image requires more than just the technical skill of shooting the night sky. I am spending more time scouting out locations with attractive foregrounds that are interesting and provide a sense of scale and relativity to the size of the Milky Way. It is massive, stretching from one horizon to the other.
It is unfortunate that so many will never experience looking up into a dark sky to see the splendor of our galaxy.