I was out in the desert a few weeks ago right at the new Moon. I took advantage of the dark skies to take some wide field shots of the Milky Way, which is right overhead at dusk this time of year.

I aligned and combined the images in PixInsight where I also removed some light pollution gradients. I finished the images in Lightroom. I took the images with my Sony RX-100 V on a iOptron sky-tracker tracking camera mount.

This first image is a composite of three, three-minute exposures. The RX100 does a noise reduction routine that takes as long as the exposure, so I find that the six minutes required for each three-minute exposure works well for me. The image was taken looking northwest. The fuzzy spot on the right is the Andromeda Galaxy, or Messier 31. The Double Cluster is visible on the right, just a little lower than the Andromeda Galaxy, just below the constellation Cassiopeia. Click on the image for a full-sized version.

The second image is a two image composite, also three minutes each. It is almost overhead, but looking toward the west. Vega is the bright star in the lower left, with the constellation Cygnus anchored by Deneb in the center of the image. The dashed line at the lower left is an airplane that passed through the frame.

I am happy to have some astrophotos here in the blog after many months, particularly given that this is nominally a website dedicated to astronomy!