In the image you can see the Orion Nebula bottom center, horsehead and the flame nebulae above it, Barnard's loop nebula faintly circling around all of those. On the right you have two bright orange objects which are Mars and Aldebaran along with the "green" comet as it fades away!

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Here's the workflow I used to edit this image.

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Great shot!

I've been there twice. The sky is amazing!

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Thank you, yes it is! Paired with amazing landscapes.

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Wow! I was stationed at the National Training Center (bordering death valley) for 5 years and though I was always in awe of the way the sky looked at nights out there, it looked even more amazing with night vision (light amplification PVS-7B typically) goggles on. Halle-Boppe comet was super bright.

But I had no idea it could look so amazing. Thanks for this!

omg! that sounds incredible!!

7 minutes exposure, but all the stars are circles and not smeared arcs? How?

There's gotta be some kind of life out there, that's like, at least five stars.

Because op lied and this is two exposures composited

With a tracking mount?

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I remember being in Afghanistan and looking up at the night sky with NODs on. Without them, sure there were some stars but with them on the sky just explodes with stars.

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But then wouldn't the ground be smeared?

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It’s a composite photo. One long exposure of sky with tracking and one still one of the ground put together for artistic effect? Affect ?

In all your travels, have you ever seen a star go supernova? ...

I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets and eventually other life. A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air. ...

I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!”

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Usually pictures like this the user takes one good photo of the ground and adds the ground to the composite afterward.

I can assure you from personal experience, Fort Irwin is far from incredible. :)

I know it’s hard to capture accurately, but what does it look like with the naked eye in comparison to this photo? Is it significantly darker? Similar?

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This video is the closest comparison I have to what the naked eye sees in dark skies like this.

That’s awesome. Thanks for sharing! I saw a similar thing when I was in Santa Fe once, but there was a fair amount of light pollution so I wasn’t really sure how that compared to these “truly dark” places out there

In landscape astrophotography it's very common practice to shoot the sky and ground separately. For the sky exposure you use a star tracker that locks onto the sky as it rotates to prevent the stars from trailing (which of course causes the foreground to be blurry). Then you shoot the foreground without the tracker and line them up the way they would have if it was a single exposure.

Ah yes, light pollution sucks. The biggest difference in dark places is that instead of looking gray and washed out, the sky looks closer to black and you can see the dust lanes in the milky way. It's still an incredible sight, you just don't get the crispness and color that a camera can capture.

Amazing photo! I was wondering what camera/setup do you use?

Capturing time on a photo still amazes me. Capturing the accumulated light blows my mind.

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How did you get that cloud in bottom right of the sky to look stationary?

Thanks! Sony a7iv, 24mm GM, benro polaris

Think about it, the light I captured is millions of years old already 🤯

I get that, I just think that it's important to state whether a photo is an actual photo, or a composite. Once you get into the realm of composites, virtually anything is possible, which means the work should be perceived and judged differently.

Great question, since the cloud got really weird from the stacked sky exposures I took it from a single frame and put it back where it should have been before stacking.

Most of it is not, the milky way isn't millions of light years across.

If I had the money, this is the kind of stuff I would do.

I’m actually talking about shutter speed. Like holding it open Long enough with aid of a tripod to accumulate time and light so that it can be burned onto film to where you can see things that can’t be seen at the speed of light by the naked eye. But I’m just a time traveler from 1977.

Oh yes, it's quite crazy how much we can capture which we can't see ourselves!

And yes, you are right; it takes millions of years for that “light” to escape the Sun’s gravitational pull and travel to Earth. Once it escapes it gets here in 8.3 seconds or so. Light must love getting away after such a long gestation.

Yet we may be the best of the lot. Unless you'd rather be a rock on Mars. Behold the uniqueness of what we have on this miracle of a planet. It's even beautiful millions of miles away. (to our limited senses, of course)

Lying implies he said something that’s wrong. He didn’t.

Yeah, he did.

"This is what 7 minutes of exposure looks like" implies a single exposure.

If you exposed for 7 minutes without compositing you'd have star trails or your landscape would be a blur. Op composited two exposures together.

I know he did. But he didn’t say single exposure. He didn’t give the full picture, that’s not lying. This isn’t high school.