This was my first attempt at taking a full Milky Way Arc with a 50mm lens. I had been to this spot before, but I felt I could improve on the previous image. I had to plan how many rows and panels would be needed to capture the Sky all the way from due South to due North. At Lough Inagh there is not one light visible in 360 degrees, which made for an excellent location to shoot from. During the 90min shoot, a few cars and a truck passed through the frames so I had to re-shoot a few sections. This shot shows the rising Milky Way, the centre of our galaxy, and the plane of the Milky Way as it stretches all the way to the North. The Andromeda galaxy is visible to the North, lower left hand side, as well as the many Red Hydrogen clouds, the biggest being the Rho Ophichui Hydrogen gas cloud on the right hand side. It wasn't until I got home, that I noticed all the colour in the sky with the Greens, Pinks, and Purples. I got lucky in capturing some faint Aurora that night. The Aurora was predicted for the following nights, but it appeared on this night to add an extra element to the image. This is image was 3 rows, with 9 panels in each row, exposed for 2mins each at 1000ISO at F2. I used a star tracker to follow the stars for each 2min exposure so that there was no blurring in each shot.I took extra filtered data while waiting for the Milky Way to rise, to capture those Hydrogen gas clouds. I stitched all the 27 frames in software to create this huge panoramic mosaic, As the sky started to brighten in the early hours of the morning, I took a row of 9 shots for the foreground. I was then able to blend the Sky and Foreground into one image. I called the image Kaleidosky, as there is so much colour in the image, and Kaleido means beauty.
