Get a fairly sensitive camera and take lots of shots of the same area fo sky, stabilise them and then layer them up in your image editor … I did something similar here:

http://1200mil.blogspot.com/2011/04/boys-are-back-in-town.html

and that’s using a Canon 20D – not the newest, or most sensitive camera (you can see the noise) … so I would think out could do an image like this by stacking lots and lots of shots together, then stacking them up, and colour correcting … my 2c only.

Can anyone tell me what kinda of camera filters are used to take these kinds of images? Is it some sort of Hydrogen-Alpha?

This can’t be a naked eye view right?

And Paul (31) said:

No details on how this was taken???

It must have been a fast exposure as there is very little motion blur in the stars and yet the milky way is so bright.

Its in the same position as the ground based objects so it can’t be photo stacking.

Must be heavily post processed to enhance brightness and color.

Phil you can’t post this kind of picture without details of how it was done, camera, lens, exposure, aperture etc… !!!!!!!

Well, I have not looked into how this was done, but I can tell you one way in which it could have been done.

IIUC, the shot is a panorama, i.e. several frames stitched together with software. That explains the super-wide angley goodness of the shot (although it could be a crop of a shot taken with a fisheye lens).

To get such brightness and clarity from the stars, you need long exposures, even with a reasonably sensitive camera. (I guess it could be an exposure of a mere handful of seconds with a super-duper highly-sensitive camera, but let’s go with assumption A for now.) On any exposure longer than about a minute, the stars will streak out into trails due to the rotation of the Earth (0.25° per minute). Thus, the star shot is probably tracked (i.e. camera mounted on an equatorial tracking mount). However, on a tracked shot, the buildings will be blurred due to the motion of the camera.

So, my guess is that this is a composite of some shots with the camera fixed (to get the foreground sharp) and some shots with the camera tracking (to get the brightness and clarity of the stars).

I hope this helps.

The south galactic pole must have been nearly overhead when this picture was taken. It’s in the constellation Sculptor, in a very empty part of the autum sky as seen from the Northern Hemisphere. The nearby star Fomalhaut would have been almost overhead.

The nearby star that ha sthe first directly imaged planets found orbiting it -and tehsecond brightest planet-hosting star by a very narrow margin behind Pollux that is :

http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/fomalhaut.html

&

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/11/13/huge-exoplanet-news-items-pictures/

&

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollux_b

PS. Will be offline for a few days from now just in case anyone wonders. Holiday.

It must have been a fast exposure as there is very little motion blur in the stars and yet the milky way is so bright.

Its in the same position as the ground based objects so it can’t be photo stacking.

Must be heavily post processed to enhance brightness and color.

Phil you can’t post this kind of picture without details of how it was done, camera, lens, exposure, aperture etc… !!!!!!!

This can’t be a naked eye view right?

OK the Milky Way is more interesting.

An artificial satellite of our galaxy would take at least as long to make an orbit as our Sun does – about 250 million years.

(To be be picky, at 8500′, this isn’t really the the High Atacama, since the Puna reaches over 21,000′ and averages 14,000′ on the plateau).

@MTU – Bifrost all the way, mate!

I have 4×3 monitors so I’m gonna have to resize this at work for my wallpaper – I hate distorted images. (My notebook, naturally, has a widescreen.)

@jennyxyzzy
I’m not sure without more details about what it is supposed to look like with the naked eye (never having had the opportunity to see this view.) Judging from the way the road barrier bulges in the middle of the photo and then tapers away on both sides this was taken with a really wide angle. So maybe the visual effect is due to the fish eye/super wide angle lens?