I had been hoping to catch a total lunar eclipse in this part of the sky. As the Moon slipped into the Earth's umbra, the Milky Way came out along the entire length of the sky from the southwest to the northeast.
I had 14 minutes to try to get all the data for this image.
All images shot from the mountains above Santa Barbara, CA with a Nikon D80 on an omegon Minitrack LX2.
Stack of 11 30s exposures at ISO 3200
Stack of 12 6 s exposures at ISO 3200
Stack of 27 2.5 s exposures at ISO 1600
The eclipsed moon is from the 2.5 s stack, and the background is from the 30 s stack. The 6 s stack was used for some blending. All images registered and processed in PixInsight, with a lot of wrangling in Photoshop to get them to all work together.
Antares is the bright star at the left. Just below and to the right of it is the globular cluster M4. I couldn't quite pull out all the dust in this area, but this composition does a reasonable job of showing how rich this region is with stars. There are some other deep sky objects (mostly globular clusters) if you hunt around. The Moon barely made it into the umbra for this eclipse, and the stark contrast from its northern end to its southern end shows this.
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