Astrophotography is a complex and time-intensive pursuit. Creating a single image can take weeks to months. I will not bore you with the technical details. There are many websites out there that will go into detail on this aspect. The images presented here are nebulous regions in our galaxy, “The Milky Way.” These astronomical objects are distant, about 2,500 light-years from Earth.
I primarily photograph nebulae. These large objects are hydrogen and oxygen gas clouds emitting light at specific wavelengths. Astronomical objects are faint, very faint. A single two-minute exposure will usually reveal very little. You have to take hundreds of single exposures and stack them together, one on top of the other, to yield something that looks reasonable. In this sense, Astrophotography is the closest you will get to the darkroom experience in the digital world. You only get to see what you have photographed once you have stacked (developed) all your images. Before this moment, everything is just pure guesswork. However, this is not the end of the story. Only in post-processing can you truly sculpt the light from the image’s darkness to produce something pleasing to the eye.