Winnats Pass

My best shot from here — and it took years to get it exactly how I’d envisaged it. One car’s tail lights heading up the pass, nothing coming down to flood the scene with light, and the tail of the Milky Way rising straight up from the top of the pass. Simple ingredients, endlessly elusive.

Previous attempts each fell short in their own way: perfect conditions but the wrong time of year for the Milky Way; everything aligned but cloud covering half the sky; an earlier version of the shot that planted the idea in the first place.

The one compromise is the full moon — the sky was washed out with barely a star visible to the naked eye. But that’s what stacking is for: 60 exposures combined to pull the Milky Way out of the moonlit haze. Add 10 black frames for noise reduction and a single foreground exposure taken separately, and you have the final image.

Oh, and the temperature at the top of the pass? A balmy -3°C. By the time I got back down to the van it had climbed all the way to 1°C. Practically tropical.