Granite Mountain near Prescott, AZ
Arizona has some amazing skies - both during the day and the nightsky. It is an amazing state, with Grand Canyons, Sierra Nevada like mountains, incredible desert-scapes, meteor craters, and tons of southwestern Americana and Native American history. Granite Mountain's 7600 ft peak, frequently snow covered in the Winter, stands watch over the former capital of AZ - Prescott - and the surrounding valley. This final image is a foreground blend of a "blue-hour" (late dusk) photo of Granite Mountain, and a stack of long exposure Milky Way images from the exact same location after astronomical dusk (true dark) and taken on a Celestron AVX equatorial mount, polar aligned but untracked. Prescott's outskirts boast a Milky Way friendly lightpollution level of Bortle ~3.5 (out of 9) - not true dark sky, but plenty to get good viewing and imaging of the fringes of our galaxy. The nature of my image aquisition and post processing include some artistic elements in how the curves were stretched and the images blended to bring out the stars and nubulosity of the Milky Way core. The Milky Way frames used in the stack were on the "long end" of typical exposure time for this type of photograpy, so the starfield is extensive. This could come across as noise to some, but for this rendition I think it adds to the grandeuer of the night sky. This image was taken in northern hemisphere mid summer, when our pespective from Earth at night is looking directly towards the Milky Way core, where beautiful dark shadows and apparent nebulosity interweave with the bright, star dense edges of our galaxy. For those interested in the stats - the Milky Way stack consists of 10 exposures at 2 minutes each, and the foreground is a single 10s exposure. Foreground and Milky Way were both taken with an APS-C format DSRL and a 14mm F/2.8 widefield lens.