Written and Photographed by Martin Lovekosi

Artist

Since my early childhood, I was fascinated by precious analog film cameras and its unbelievable mystical technique that was both - a miracle and a secret process. I feel the same for darkness and the night itself. My nocturnal adventures started in my teenage years with graffiti and hip-hop culture until I spent more than a decade in nightclubs, at techno raves and festivals - the camera always by my side. To make a long story short: somewhere along the way the dancefloor and backstage rooms got swapped to volcanoes and calderas to celebrate the love for the night in a more challenging, peaceful, and liberating way with a camera in my hands, some deep hypnotic house tunes in my ear and the Milky Way in the viewfinder.

You can explore my images and stories on my Behance or Instagram!

About the Image

Galactic Center of the Milky Way Galaxy at the Caldera de Las Cañadas

The center of the Milky Way is by far the most interesting, diversified, and photogenic region of the night sky as seen from planet Earth. You can find huge dark dust lanes, star clusters, colorful nebulae, and famous constellations like Sagittarius and Scorpius. As a photographer with a huge interest in the technical part of photography and tending to more complex panorama work - it’s a great joy to work with longer focal lengths and a star tracker on such a region in the night sky. The peak night of the Perseids Meteor Shower 2020 - August 12th/13th - was a good moment to go down the rabbit hole of such an exhausting photography project. While I was continuously shooting with my Nikon D810 to capture some Perseids above the mighty Pico del Teide at Tenerife - a dark sky region at the Canary Islands - the Time was right to start such a panorama with my H-Alpha modified Nikon D800a. My goal was to get a colorful and contrasty panorama of the Center of the Milky Way where the focus is more on the Galaxy than the landscape itself. That’s why the final image is turned 90 degrees. It’s a close-up Image of our Galaxy - there is no more up and down necessary.

If you have to carry lots of gear and love to hike to remote spots at night, the Vixen Polarie Star Tracker is a good and lightweight choice to get some smooth long exposures. Luckily, it was mostly calm at the Ucanca Valley, so I got some crisp stars on-screen - even with 180s exposures and without any counterweight. At least at the beginning. To keep as much color details as possible, ISO 800 and an aperture f/4 where the basic settings - very low for astrophotography but the result speaks for itself.

Working with a focal length of 85mm was exciting and promising while the first test shoots revealed some extraordinary details of the galaxy’s dust lanes and nebulae. But if you work with such a sensitive and unprotected setup you never know how far you will get. With such a narrow lens you need many images to get a balanced good-looking Panorama - so there are many chances to mess up the whole project and go home empty-handed. In the end, there were twice as many fails of every panorama position on my card and I had to readjust and polar align my tracker again and again. Have you ever tried to protect your gear from soft wind holding your open jacket right behind your camera for three minutes, again and again, just to get one star trailed image after another on your screen? Sometimes it’s really hard but these challenges make such photography adventures so exciting and the final images so precious.

The post-production workflow starts in Lightroom with basic editing: color adjustments, reducing noise, and chromatic aberration. It continues in PTGui to get the full panorama of the foreground and sky and ends up in Photoshop, combining the two parts, adjust the colors and contrast again, and the final battle with several stars reducing techniques to increase the nebulosity and details of the dust lanes.

All in all, it takes around eight to ten hours to get such an image. Three to four hours for setting up gear, shooting the frames, curse, and despair. And again four to five hours for a backup, copy, import, export, the main post-processing, and saving these huge files. It’s lots of work while lots of patience and coffee is necessary to get such images on your screen, but even when you are about to despair and everything sucks, it’s still so much fun to be out in the night, stumbling around with your equipment and to discover and gain new perspectives.

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