Milky Way Core over Glencoe's Glacial Landscape, Scotland

Glencoe Milky Way Core 2023 by Steven Robinson Pictures, on Flickr

Beautiful to see the Milky Way Core over Glencoe a few weeks ago in the Scottish Highlands. Even more beautiful to see it in it's natural colour, without any colour toning etc that we as photographers often apply to our images. (The milky way is not blue or purple like we often see on social media / forums). There is a special process involved to ensure star colour is kept when taking and processing pictures such as this. I love shooting the milky way in dark locations whilst trying to preserve the multitude of star colours in our night sky. The top left area is the constellation Cygnus (the Swan), you can see a very pinkish area of nebula which are stellar nurseries.
In Scotland we do not see as much of the core as Southern latitudes. People much further south around the world have that luxury. But then again, we have the luxury of this beautiful scenery so - every cloud! (Hopefully not for astrophotography).
If you look to the bottom right you can see the famous Lagangarbh Hut used by the Scottish Mountaineering Society. On the right is Buachaille Etive Mòr, Scotlands most famous mountain standing at just over 1,000 meters in height.
I am glad I got this but frustrated the frost did not show up. The place was covered in it, and it dropped to minus 7. Being out in that for hours really takes it's toll on the ends of your fingers, no matter how much I think to myself how crazy this is I always come round to "No, I must do this; and yes I do love doing this".

Image shot with the 35/1.4 sigma art on a Star Adventurer mount.

Wow! This is amazingly lovely.

Gorgeous

Thanks both

Pure awesomeness, Steven! Thank you for sharing the beauty and for the inspiration!

Thanks Ernie, hope you are well and nice to see you here.

A nice restrained image from one of my favourite locations.

Thank you!

Please tell us about exposure and other technical aspects of this image.

I’m curious as well.

Wow!

Spectacular!

No problems. For this, I used a 35mm/1.4 sigma art lens, stopped down to f/2 to clean it up a bit on a star adventurer mount. I used a large 40% overlap so I only got the best central stars from each exposure, this helps get rid of any minor edge aberrations. Each image is f/2, ISO 1600 for 1 minute. I used a D850 in silent shutter mode - less shutter wear and no vibrations, win win for stuff like this. There are about 7 vertical images of the sky stitched to obtain the field of view. I stitched these in Microsoft ICE (highly recommended free Windows program). This gives much greater detail than say, obtaining the same FOV with a 14mm lens due to clear aperture size I can gather many times the light with the bigger aperture and exposure time. The ground is the same lens, a pano without the tracker on. This method is really the only way to get the detail you see here. I then processed it using clarkvision.com method - stretching as per usual with astro images and no local adjustments to the sky and blended them together.

Thanks to all that have commented, really nice of you all to say so. I have updated the post to a flickr link so you can zoom in more to see the details.

Nice to see you primeshooter! That picture is spectacular. The description of how you captured it is really interesting as well.

Thanks, any questions happy to answer.

Fantastic shot!

I have camped in Glencoe, and remember the mites and mossies! So we moved on to Skye and paddled round most of it. An amazing adventure!