The last few days have been glorious with cloud free nights. After excellent viewing at the Observatory on Friday night, I decided to head to the Nelson Lakes for some wide-field Milky way imaging. It has been a while since I have enjoyed such clear skies, with my last few visits to Lake Rotoiti not living up to the promised cloud forecasts. Last night was different, and the sky was just amazing. The Milky Way was stunning and clear. It was, however, very cold. Gear and camera bags covered in frost by the end of the night and my Landcruiser telling me it was -3C as I left to head back to Nelson.

Below is a cropped view from the main 360-degree image I was shooting, which is below (right-click to full screen). Processing details: Camera Canon EOS R5, Sigma Art 14mm F1.8 lens, Benro Polaris (with Astro Kit) for tracking. Sky captured tracked, with camera set at ISO 1000, exp 30s, lens at F3.2 and 5 images captured for each of 21 positions (7 columns and 3 rows for the full 360 with a 50% overlap between images). Foreground was one row of 7 images, ISO 1,000, F 1.8, exp 180s. Stacking of individual images was undertaken in pixinsight and then panorama alignment for sky and foreground was processed in PTgui Pro. Final processing was done in Photoshop.

Crop from 360 image:

360-degree image: