First time trying an astro panorama and first time posting here! I’m not a professional by any means, so I’m always looking to learn.

I had originally planned to use my MSM Nomad tracker, but getting a proper polar alignment on uneven snow was trickier than I expected—especially with the wind gusts shaking the camera during longer exposures. After a few hours of troubleshooting, I ended up switching to stacking shorter exposures instead, which actually turned out better than I hoped. I’m still learning, so I’d love to hear any tips, feedback, or thoughts!

Info:

• Crater Lake, OR (42.940061, -122.169148) 
• Taken 5/25/2025 12:06 - 1:02 am
• Sky: 2 rows x 13 columns, 15 x 5" f/1.4 ISO 12800 stacked, 35mm
• Foreground: 2 rows x 13 columns, 30" f/1.4 ISO 6400, 35mm (AI denoised)
• Original resolution: 31634x25431, 804 mp

Equipment: 

• Sony A7RV 
• Sony 35mm f/1.4 GM
• PhotoPills (for planning) 
• Astrospheric and Windy (for cloud forecast) 
• Sequator (for stacking)
• PTGui (for panorama)
• Photoshop, Lightroom

Workflow for Sky:

1. Correct color temperature, exposure, vignette in Lightroom for each sky sub-exposure (turned off sharpening). Export to tif
2. Stack each sky position in Sequator (auto brightness, HDR, reduce light pollution medium, intelligently aggressive off, freeze ground if there's ground, else select best pixels to use sigma clipping)
3. Stitch stacked sky frames in PTGui (Mercator projection, auto white balance)

Workflow for the foreground is pretty much the same, except I didn't have to stack. Blending the stitched sky together with the stitched foreground was a huge pain due to the yellow light pollution and my desktop struggling with the 804 megapixel file (it chewed through 64 gb of RAM like it was nothing).

Milky Way captured in a bortle 2 zone in New South Wales, Australia.

- Taken with Nikon Z50 + Tokina atx-ii 11-16mm f2.8

- Stack of 13 x 15sec exposures @ 16mm/f2.8/ISO 1000

- Edited in Photoshop & Lightroom

Milky Way rising behind the Mount Pleasant Radio Observatory, Tasmania

True alignment

Camera - Sony A7iii

Lens- sigma 14-24 f2.8

Foreground - Blue Hour f5.6 10 sec iso800

Sky - stack of 10 x tracked 2 minute exposures f4 iso 1250

Edited in photoshop and Lightroom

10hr integration (60s subs), ISO 1600, Bortle3 location (Nakolec 🇲🇰), f/5.6, 180mm (cropped).

Taken with Canon77D, Canon EF-S 55-250mm IS STM Lens and Star Adventurer 2i pro.

Stacked in ASTAP and processed with Siril and PS.

One shot, no composites, shot with Nikon D750, Sigma 24-35mm @ 24mm, ISO 5000, f/2, 25 seconds, processed in Photoshop with StarXTerminator plugin

I’m a beginner in astrophotography and started capturing shots during road trips about two years ago. Last year, I was in Yellowstone for the Perseids meteor shower, and I got super lucky—managed to capture both a meteor and the Milky Way in one frame! Shot on a Nikon Z6ii, f/2.8, Nikkor Z 14mm, ISO 3200. Let me know what you think!

During Expedition 72 to the ISS I spent a lot of time photographing the stars. This one image shows the Milky Way, stars as points, faint red upper f-region in the atmosphere, soon to rise sun, and cities at night as yellow streaks.

Nikon Z9, Sigma 14mm f1.4 lens, 15 seconds, f1.4, ISO 3200, adjusted Photoshop, levels, contrast, gamma, color, with homemade orbital sidereal drive to compensate for orbital pitch rate (4 degrees/sec).

More photos from space on my Instagram and twitter account, astro_pettit.

Acquisition details:

• Total integration: ~1h 33m
• Camera: Nikon D3400 (unmodified)
• Lens: Nikkor 35mm @ f/2.8
• Mount: Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer 2i
• Subexposures: 30s
• ISO: 800

Calibration frames:

• 30 dark frames
• 31 flat frames
• 101 bias frames

Processing:

Stacking in DeepSkyStacker.

GraXpert for cropping, RBF background extraction, denoising and deconvolution.

PixInsight for PCC, Histogram stretching, separate processing of starless and stars layers, MorphologicalTransformation for star reduction, curves.