How To Photograph the Milky Way on the Shortest Night of the Year

In this astrophotography adventure we try to capture the milky way on the longest day of the year. During summer solstice at 52 degrees North the sun doesn't set lower than 14 degrees below the horizon. During this twilight period of grey nights, a lot nightscape photographers (myself included) set their hobby on pause. But is that even necessary? What would happen if we tried anyway?

We have several ideas to tackle this nautical twilight challenge, one of which is to combine all the data we shot this night together into one megastack of 2,5 hours exposure time! We also try using an h-alpha filter to boost the contrast of our image. I also show you how I managed to combine all the data of 4 different camera's and lenses into one stacked result. Ofcourse I compare them to a single exposure and a stacked result of only my own data. The results might surprise you!

I use an astromodified Canon 6D with a Sigma Art 14-24 f/2.8 lens riding on a Skywatcher Star Adventurer Star Tracker.

In this video I am joined by Martijn Jacobs, Corne Ouwehand and Sjon de Mol.

You might also like Alyn Wallace, Nightscape Images, Scotlands Nightsky, AstroHBF, Chasing Luminance, John Rutter photography, AstroBackyard and Milky Way Mike.

[scotlandsnightsky]

Interesting video man! Really enjoyed watching the story! Enjoy all of your dark nights, no excuses now for not going out :)

[Seegurkenwombat]

Very cool!! I bet you could do even better if one stacking program would be able to blend all data together without preprocessing in Sequator! I made Sxlcreenshots and compared the "your data only" shot vs the all data and wow cool difference! Not 4x better but nonetheless cool! Keep on going!

[Mark_Wierda]

Cool experiment with all the data of the four of you together! Beautiful end result and a nice video to end the weekend with 👌🏻

[FrankPietersen]

wow, what a great experiment. Gives me some hope for Sweden in a short while, unless it is even more light over there. Well done guys!

[niels]

Damm wat gaaf man! Wat een werk maar wat een resultaat 👌👌👌 well done

[GrowPhotography]

Fascinating stuff Jeroen, love your ingenuity. We've just had the longest night here at 32 degrees south so no shortage of darkness to play with down under at the moment 😉

[nightscapejournals]

That’s superb, Jeroen. The detail is phenomenal! More data is very often the answer, and well done for persevering to find a way to combine those stacks - the result was well worth it (I think I would have stacked each in Sequator and then stacked the stacks in Sequator too, but the way you’ve done the starless stacks has really brought out the detail beautifully). Nice compositions too. Roll on more darkness (oh, and fewer clouds please!). Greetings from a very rainy, cloudy and NLC-free Scotland!

[KoenvanBarneveld]

Lekker avontuur weer hoor! Enne, vanaf nu nooit meer een zomer overslaan!;)

[andrevandermeulen]

Nice! No I need to go out as soon as the moon and bad weather is gone!

[matej.mlakar]

You dudes sure know how to have fun :D great images too of course. And nice way to celebrate night like summer solstice in this modern materialistic time we are in.

[fabriciohenrique]

Hi, is your lens a sigma art 14-24mm 2.8 DG HSM? If yes, what do you think of its performance?