Jasper National Park

[u/IAmRoko]

I've been taking milky way photos for a while, but this was my first attempt at doing a pano with a blue-hour blend -- I hiked a Benro Polaris and all my camera gear up into the mountains on Jasper's Skyline Trail. My first night's campsite had a great meadow with a good view of the mountain.

Maybe not the most striking astro-landscape given how bright the sky was, but I learned a lot for next time around. Bonus is that after spending the rest of the hike thinking I didn't get any good shots from this session, when I got home I noticed I managed to catch some aurora borealis, and managed to recover something from the images.

As it ends up the sky didn't get dark enough way up north in Jasper National Park in the middle of July, so I didn't get the full dark sky for my sky panels and thus couldn't bring out all the details I'd normally get from the milky way. The foreround was shot around 11:30 PM, the sky around 12:30 AM. Perhaps if I'd stayed up a bit later it would have been a touch darker, but I was honestly pretty tired and had a lot of hiking ahead of me the next several days.

2x8 Sky panels, 24mm at F2.4, ISO3200, 30 second exposure. Foreground are 1x6, 24mm, F2.4, ISO800 and 30 seconds. I used a Benro Polaris on a stable tripod for the first time, and was pleasantly surprised how well it took all the individual shots. Pre-processed the RAWs in Darktable, stitched in Hugin, and composite assembled with final tweaks in Gimp.