Photographing the Milky Way

The visit to Galactica last week made such an impression on us, we decided to travel back to Sierra de Javalambre earlier this week to photograph the stars.

We arrived an hour before sunset to scout locations and we watched a lovely sunset with a crescent moon above. Unfortunately the location we chose had wind turbines everywhere, but hey! If you can’t fight them, join them. So the turbines became characters in the story and actually made a pretty interesting foreground. The moon set early, giving us a perfect dark starry night – or so we thought.

When I downloaded the images, I saw a lot of light pollution coming from the direction of Valencia and ruining the best shot, the Milky Way core! We were on a Class 3 region according to the Bortle Scale and to our eyes there was plenty of darkness but the camera’s sensitivity picked up a ton of light pollution. And a ton of star lights! Not bad for our very first time trying astrophotography! ✨🪐🚀📷