Milky Way over Beachy Head | Astronomy Magazine

Tall white sea cliffs drop into dark, blurred water at night, with and rolling grassy hills fading into the distance on the left. Above, a dense arch of the Milky Way stretches above a colorful sky on the horizon — cool blue and teal on the left, with orange light pollution at right. The Milky Way forms bright white star clouds set against a darker sky above packed with sharp stars.

Marco Wong, taken from Sussex, U.K.

The Milky Way’s bright star fields and dense dust lanes arch above the chalk cliffs of Beachy Head and the English Channel in this wide-field nightscape. The photographer used a Canon DSLR and a 28mm f/1.4 lens to take a tracked vertical panorama of five panels of stacked sky exposures totaling over 24 minutes, roughly half of which was taken with an Hα filter. The foreground comprises a separate five-panel panorama taken with a 14mm f/2.8 lens; this was blended with the sky for the final image.