Many years ago I shot an image of the Milky Way rising behind Wukoki Pueblo in Wupatki National Monument in northern Arizona. Afterwards, I promised myself that I would do that shot again using newer lenses and cameras along with, hopefully, better technique.

I finally committed to getting the photograph earlier this week. The date/time required that the Milky Way be low in the eastern sky so it was not too far above the pueblo. It also required the waxing crescent Moon be high enough in the western sky to illuminate the foreground—but also low enough to set before the Milky Way got too high in the eastern sky.

I took a shot of the foreground and pueblo with an exposure time of 300 seconds using long exposure noise reduction; LENR doubled the total time required for image acquisition to 600 seconds. I wasn’t in a hurry…

And then I waited about 30 minutes for the Moon to set. Fortunately, I had brought a camp chair to sit on.

After the Moon had set I took several 300-second shots of the Milky Way in a very dark sky—again with LENR on.

Once back home, I took the Milky Way shots and did image stacking to remove both image noise and, more importantly, aircraft/satellite tracks. The stack became the background photo to combine with the foreground photo.

The result was pretty good but I wanted to try something more. I imported the Milky Way image stack into Siril, an astrophotograhy software package, and ran the “reduce stars” script. This has the effect of removing and/or dimming most stars while leaving the glow of the Milky Way alone.

The result is shown above.

I think I will try this again with some changes. Looking forward to this.