About the Image(s)

Photographing the Milky Way arc has long been an ambition of mine, but the opportunities are limited. In the northern hemisphere it can only be done in the (very) early morning for a few weeks in Spring and requires a combination of a dark sky location, no moon and of course clear skies. We visited the Isle of Lewis in Scotland at the end of April and stayed just 5 minutes from the Callanish standing stones, so on a clear night, my wife and I visited the stones and I managed the attached image. The stones date from around 2750BC and consist of 13 stones arranged in a circle around a large central stone (about 5m high and weighing 7 tonnes), then a further 35 stones arranged as a cross extending from the circle. There are various theories about why these stones were erected, including that they might have some astronomical significance, so a Milky Way shot emphasises that connection. Also in view is the Andromeda Galaxy above the third stone from the left.
The image was taken as a 6-way panorama, then stitched together in Lightroom. I have attached one of the panel to show how dark the originals were. Extracting detail in the Milky Way was 'fairly' easy, using mainly the clarity slider in Lightroom, then in Photoshop de-saturating and darkening some of the light pollution (from the town of Stornoway 15 miles away). However I struggled with the foreground which was very noisy. After several iterations, I tried applying the new AI noise reduction tool in Lightroom to each image before combining into the panorama, and that seemed to give the best result. I also used a specialist Astro process called Blur Xterminator which tightens up the stars and improves the details in the Milky Way. (Unfortunately the 1MB limit on the PSA Dialogue images undoes a lot of that good work!) So this is version 8 or 9, and took me about a week of trial and error before arriving at a version that I am happy with.
Technical details: Photographed at 1:50AM! Canon EOS-R5 with Canon 16mm F2.8 pancake lens. 6 stitched images, each taken at 30sec, F2.8, ISO1600.