This was taken as part of a sort of limits-testing adventure for my camera back in July of 2024. I started the hike in around 108 degree weather, but thankfully by that time the sun was already setting so the harshest of the heat had passed. The harshest heat for my camera however, did not. Both my sky and foreground images were absolutely filled with hot pixels!

That wasn’t the tricky part as far as editing goes. Most seasoned astrophotographers are privy to the seemingly ever-present airglow during the average solar maximum night. If it moves fast enough or is relatively structureless, tracked exposures tend to smooth it out into one big green blob of film covering your pristine dark sky milky way region. Even at my typical 2-4 minute pano exposures at 40mm, I find that several nights tend to produce airglow results similar to this and it has been bugging me for quite some time now! 

This solution was much less simple than a single gradient removal too. I did multiple, one for the full image with stars, another for the starless image, and a final ‘manual’ sort of gradient removal. Usually when you rip out the gradient so aggressively like this, your background tends to get super noisy and even blotchy or varied in texture, and that final ‘manual’ gradient removal helped with that quite a bit. The idea was to color balance the green out of the original sky (and ruin the milky way color balance in the process, which was spot on to begin with even though it’s difficult to tell through the green). Doing this ensured I had that dark, space-like background but with all of the natural texture and noise-free-ness of the original data retained. I carefully used luminance masking, opacity, and blend modes to work it into the final image, critically preserving the subtle cyans that encapsulate portions of the core region.

I’m thinking about making a tutorial somewhere down the line to cover this technique in full when I have a computer with the processing power to do so while recording, so if that’s something you might be interested in, I’ll probably announce it on my instagram @jdt_photos_ with a permanent highlight! This year was a big year for me as far as airglow research goes, and I’m excited to present more advice about how to actively manage airglow situations to get the most out of your sky in a single night! Perhaps a full raw workflow of this image is in order using the same philosophy, to ensure it’s repeatable. 

Slide the slider back and forth to see how the sky changes with the edits applied. In total, there was foreground color balancing, hot pixel removal, mask edge cleaning, panorama stitching and HaRGB combination, and the edits described above!