Here’s my third attempt at shooting a Milky Way shot with my new Rokinon 14mm 2.8 lens that I purchased on Amazon Prime day. I’ve been wanting to shoot astrophotography for awhile now to expand my options beyond just sunrise and sunset photos. When this lens when on sale on Amazon for $70 off, I decided it was time. It was good timing as well, as July is the best month to take Milky Way pictures as the galactic core is highest in the sky. I also managed to get the lens just as the moon was taking a break from the night sky for a couple weeks.

Location

I took a long weekend trip up to northern Wisconsin with my wife and her Dad. I used some light pollution map website to scout out locations ahead of time that had boat launches on the northern side of lakes (since the Milky Way is in the southern part of the sky). I found about 6 such lakes up near Minocqua that I thought would be interesting. Of my 5 nights up there, 2 nights had clouds while the other 3 didn’t so I had 3 chances to take some pictures. Little John lake was the last place I visited and is about 10 miles north of Minocqua.

Composition

Composing night time pictures is really hard I’ve found. Pretty much everything is pitch black and the only way I can tell what my camera is looking at is by shinning my flashlight around in front of me while I look through the viewfinder. I knew I wanted some of the foreground in the picture like the dock so I made sure that was in my scene as I was shinning the light around. There’s also a fairly bright star at the top of the Milky Way that I can see on my camera that I usually use as an identifier to make sure I have enough of the sky in frame.

Post Processing

For my third Milky Way image, I decided to use a technique called ISO stacking (or Exposure Stacking). ISO Stacking means taking several pictures of the same scene with the same settings. In this case I took 8 photos without changing any settings on my camera. Then, back in post-processing I used Photoshop to manually align these images. Finally I used the median smart object filter to blend these together to remove noise. This technique works wonders on removing noise and allows you to push the limits farther with post processing that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise as the picture would end up too grainy.

Some other changes I made were to adjust the white balance, add a liberal amount of clarity and finally straighten the horizon out better since my lens suffers from poor distortion.

Software Used

Lightroom

Photoshop

Techniques Used

Exposure Stacking

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