Twilight Milky Way, pt deux
Tracked twilight Milky Way panoramas might just be the panacea of "Nightscape" photography in terms of difficulty, for me anyways. Everything from timing the first exposure all the way through post processing requires a tremendous amount of effort to get a final image that looks natural while preserving detail and intrigue. The light changes so rapidly that doing long, tracked exposures of the sky jeopardizes the timing of sky and foreground illumination, you can't waste any time between exposures otherwise the sky lightens too fast and you lose detail, subsequently the foreground is too bright and looks unnatural against the sky. A huge amount of time in post processing is spent trying to match each exposure to its neighbor, in terms of lightness, contrast, color, etc, otherwise the stitching looks awful and the blending is near impossible. Luckily this one worked out well, taken in the 30 minutes from just before astro twilight to after. 12 exposures for this image, all shot with a Nikon D5300 and Sigma Art 18-35mm on a Sky Watcher Star Adventurer tracking mount. Sky shots are 3 minutes at ISO 400 and f2.5, foreground shots are 1.5 minutes at ISO 400 and f1.8.
