Here’s a shot I took last August (2019) up in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Upper Michigan at a small park on Lake Superior called Brunette Park. One of my main purposes of this trip was to take night sky photos as it’s a very dark location. I ended up spending two nights out until 2-3am shooting the stars and it was a blast!

Location

As I mentioned before, Brunette Park is located in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Upper Michigan. There’s a road that travels along Lake Superior for a long ways and there’s several small parks you can stop at and enjoy the view. Brunette Park is one of the larger parks up there and faces almost directly south. Many of the other parks are at an angle so they may not work as well for Milky Way photos.

One of my nights at the park there were quite a few people there also looking at the stars. Another large group started a fire in a fire pit, but left at about 11pm. Something to consider if you also visit the park as there may be others there who could get in your photo. The shot here was from my second night at the park where I pretty much had it to myself. The only downside that night was there was some clouds coming in which you can see in my photo.

Composition

I will admit, I’m not original in the composition you see in this post. I had seen it somewhere else online during my scouting and decided to shoot it myself. The shot it taken near the fire pit so if there’s others at the park using it, you won’t be able to take it as they’ll be in your way or the smoke will obscure your view.

This is a good time to call out that it’s very important that you spend some time scouting a location online prior to visiting it, especially if it’s 7 hours away like this was. For instance a lot of the parks up here had trees that would be in way of the Milky Way. A lot of times online, you can find 360 views of parks on Google Maps which helps with determining the spatial layout of a place. I also recommend stopping at places during the day and using Photopills to virtually see where the Milky Way will be later which I did at several of the parks along Lake Superior during the day.

Once I had my composition, I took five images using my Sigma 14mm lens at f1.8. I had accidentally left my camera in crop-mode the entire vacation so this technically is a 21mm shot, doh! I had my Skyguider Pro with me as well, but didn’t use it for this shot as the clouds were rolling in pretty quick and it usually takes me a long time to setup. Also the Milky Way was moving across the sky and by the time I would have had it setup, it probably would have been behind the tree already.

Post Processing

I worked on this photo on and off over the course of 4-5 months. Since having a kid, I haven’t had as much time to both take and post-process photos anymore. The post-processing part is especially difficult as I usually need 4-5 solid hours to edit a Milky Way photo as it involves a lot of masking and small tweaks.

For this shot, I used Sequator to stack the 5 exposures. Then I imported it to Lightroom and sent it to Photoshop. In Photoshop I made my typical pixel-level edits first like removing star colors, adding an orton effect and star minimization. After that I started creating masks and setup my adjustment layers with levels, curves, white balance etc.

Software Used

Lightroom

Photoshop

Raya Pro

Sequator

Techniques Used

Exposure Stacking

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