High Cliff State Park is one of the closest parks State Parks to where I live. Based on light pollution maps it’s also one of the closest places that has lower/moderate light pollution so it’s a great place for me to visit and test things out. It was the second place I visited after I bought my new Rokinon 14mm lens. You can check out my first photo I took there on Flickr. Since then, I have switched to a processing technique called exposure stacking which the nice people at Lonelyspeck.com explain on this Youtube video.

Location

High Cliff State Park is located on the northeast side of Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin’s largest lake. The park is part of the early segment of the Niagara escarpment which is what the Niagara Falls are named after. At the top of the cliffs that make up the park is an observation tower which allows you to see all the way across Lake Winnebago. When I got into Astrophotography, I always thought this would be a good location to take pictures from (those fancy telescopes are always on top of mountains I reasoned). High Cliff is only open until 11pm, and the sun sets at about 7:45pm so August is a good month to get out and get some shots.

Composition

Much like my last visit, I decided to try to keep a lot of the observation tower in frame.  It’s really the only foreground interest available. A nearby shelter has some pretty strong lights on and those illuminate the wood on the tower from the left hand side. Unfortunately the Milky Way is also around the same area as a nearby city which gives off light pollution so no matter you do, there’s going to be some of that going on in the photos. I took a series of 6 photos at 30 seconds each. In the Lonelyspeck.com tutorial they recommend more than this, but I find after 6 shots, the Milky Way moves so much that it makes manually aligning the photos in Photoshop more difficult and not worth my time. I’m also pretty happy with the noise reduction I get with 6 images.

Post Processing

Like I mentioned earlier, I now do a processing technique called exposure stacking. I find that this tends to bring out the best details in the Milky Way while also keeping the noise at bay. If I didn’t do this and still processed it the same, the image would become much more noisy and it wouldn’t allow me to push the processing as far.

Below is a comparison of a before and after shot using exposure stacking. The image on the left is before and on the right is after. You can see all the colored speckles are gone on the right. The only disadvantage to this is you lose a bit of detail as the effect can smear the image a little bit. Not that this is also a 200% crop so the smearing isn’t as obvious zoomed out. Also the smearing is due to my not aligning the images 100% exact. The better you get at this, the better it will be.

Another technique I implement this time was to correct the white balance right away in the image before saving it as a Tiff in Photoshop after the manual alignment. By giving it a neutral color to begin with, I felt this gave me more options later when I brought the photo back into Lightroom.

Once in Lightroom, I applied my signature purple hue to the image which I tend to do in a lot of images. After that I increased the clarity many times. I also used the tone curve for the first time which I learned about on a Youtube video for processing Milky Way photos. This seemed to really help bring out the Milky Way vs. some of my prior photos.

Software Used

Lightroom

Photoshop

Techniques Used

Exposure Stacking

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