September Milky Way

A few weeks ago I made my way back up the hill next to our house to the same hay­field where I took my Super Blue Moon pho­to at the begin­ning of this month. That beau­ti­ful full moon was now a new moon, and con­di­tions for pho­tograph­ing the Milky Way core were promis­ing. Those round bales of hay were still there and I thought they might make an inter­est­ing foreground.

As before, I made sure to get up the hill before sun­set with enough time to find a com­po­si­tion. There were still some low clouds mov­ing through but I was hope­ful they would dis­si­pate in time. I walked around the field using the PhotoPills app on my phone to show me where to expect to see the Milky Way. I chose a com­po­si­tion with four round bales on a gen­tle slope, each pro­gres­sive­ly fur­ther from where I would be, for the fore­ground. The app pre­dict­ed the MW could be seen a lit­tle after nine, near­ly ver­ti­cal and direct­ly in the mid­dle of that view.

With the light pol­lu­tion we have around here, even in the coun­try it is dif­fi­cult to see the MW with just your eyes, but a cam­era can cap­ture it using a long expo­sure. I knew there would be light pol­lu­tion on the hori­zon, as Richmond is 12 miles in the exact direc­tion from me as the MW was going to be. I hoped that since I was going to be shoot­ing up the slope toward the hay bales that the hill would block the worst of the light pol­lu­tion, but it was still significant.

While I wait­ed for the MW to become vis­i­ble, I went through a men­tal check­list of the cam­era set­tings I need­ed, but most­ly my mind just wan­dered. I heard a screech owl off in the dis­tance a cou­ple of times, but oth­er­wise it was qui­et. There was just the slight­est breeze and with the cool­er night­time tem­per­a­ture I was wish­ing I had worn a long sleeve shirt. It was­n’t cold, but that breeze was com­ing from the north and kiss­ing the back of my neck, a cool reminder that fall would be here soon.

The fore­ground pho­to is a sin­gle image, tak­en dur­ing the blue hour. An hour lat­er, with­out mov­ing the tripod/camera, I took mul­ti­ple long expo­sure pho­tos of the MW. I was very lucky to have caught a shoot­ing star dur­ing one of those shots. I used pho­to pro­cess­ing soft­ware to stack the sky images to reduce the noise in them. Then I blend­ed the fore­ground and resul­tant sky pho­to togeth­er for the final pho­to. I haven’t done much MW pho­tog­ra­phy and there’s a lot of tri­al-and-error in pro­cess­ing the pho­to. I learn some­thing new every time — that’s part of the fun of it.