Another image from Molas Pass along the famed Million Dollar Highway in Colorado. The Million Dollar Highway was named for the amount of gold and silver taken down it, but for me it's the Million Dollar Views that make this highway so aptly named. This is back from August. I was set up to do Deep Space Astro in the Molas Pass parking lot, but had also set up a couple of cameras to capture the Milky Way. This was from a series of single images I did with the Nikon D850 and the Sigma 14mm f1.8.
Note: this is the Tail of the Milky Way and not the Core.
The moon had set just prior to this. I shot a series of images, I let it run for 20 minutes or so at ISO 3200, 25 secs and f1.8. Then I stopped and captured a couple of longer shutter speed images of 120 seconds. I left the camera at f1.8 and ISO 3200 as I just wanted to expose better for the ground as it was pretty dark down in there after the moon had set. I ended up with 3 images, that I then stacked in Photoshop, turned into a Smart Object and then changed the Layering Mode to Mean. I usually will use Median or Mean. I will try both to see which I like better.
The single image of the Milky Way and the reflection looked good, even the ground was pretty noise free. But the stacked images shot immediately after had more detail in the trees, the individual branches had more detail, where as in the single image the tree was there, and there wasn't noise as I mentioned, but the finer details had gotten lost. So I used the single image of the Milky Way as my base shot, and then blended in just the ground layer detail in from the stacked images. The Reflection and Sky are all the same image as I didn't want to mess that up.
All comments are welcome,
Jim
