I was recently fortunate enough to be gifted the opportunity to stay at a brand-new luxurious "retreat", about 3 hours away from my humble hometown. While a portion of the trip was for work purposes, there would be plenty of downtime in the evenings, giving me time to amuse myself with photographic expeditions. And since the location was deep in the wilderness, I knew that it would make for a great starscape opportunity.

On the first evening, I set my camera up around 10pm with the intention of capturing a section of the milky way - easily visible with the naked eye. While the photos were coming out just fine, I wasn't happy about not being able to see the entire milky way in one shot - the 24mm lens just wasn't wide enough.

So what's the next best solution? Shoot a few from left to right, and merge... panorama time!

The final result - 3 image panorama, 20 second exposure on each image. Merged automatically using the remarkably good photomerge feature in Photoshop.

Full image size? Over 11,000px wide, and 40+mb.

In retrospect, the conditions were actually great, and I'm slightly sad that I didn't take advantage of them more. Mainly, the moon wasn't set to rise, there was zero cloud cover, and I was essentially in the middle of nowhere with the milky way directly in front of me. The only artificial light within a 50km radius came in the form of another hotel a few kilometres down the road - you can see the blue glow from there peeking up on the right of the image. Other than that, total darkness.

This is a daytime photo from nearly the exact same spot - only a few meters difference between the panorama and this one. Not a bad view hey?

Moving on from my rather static-looking photo of the milky way, I set about taking some more traditional star trail photos once my panorama experiment was complete. They turned out...ok. I'll post the results here soon for all to see, so stay tuned.

Thanks to Deep Purple for the post name idea!

Equipment Setup