02
Oct
2022
During my holiday stay in Greece, we spent a few nights on the small island Skopelos. This island is famous for its beautiful beaches and green vegetation. Also, the Movie “Mamma Mia!” was filmed at some of the beaches on this island!
One night I was sitting down at one of the smaller harbors and took this photo! While the artificial Lightpollution there is very low, the natural Lightpollution is very high due to the high humidity from the sea water.
However, through using some post-processing tricks (which I also use on my other photos) I was able to calculate the effect of the Lightpollution on the image and subtract it, yielding a very clear view of the milky way.
The raw stack (completely unedited) looked like this:
Since the stars move quite a bit over the 26 images, an algorithm was used to stabilize / calibrate the stars on every photo, ensuring that they were overlayed precisely with relation to the stars when stacking together the 26 photos. However, as you might have noticed, this causes the foreground (the rocks at the bottom of the image) to get blurred. For this reason I had to take a separate photo to capture the rocks, and overlay them on the finished photos. This ensures that both, background (milky way) and foreground (rocks / ground) are sharp and not blurred.