Great question, since the cloud got really weird from the stacked sky exposures I took it from a single frame and put it back where it should have been before stacking.
Ah yes, light pollution sucks. The biggest difference in dark places is that instead of looking gray and washed out, the sky looks closer to black and you can see the dust lanes in the milky way. It's still an incredible sight, you just don't get the crispness and color that a camera can capture.
In landscape astrophotography it's very common practice to shoot the sky and ground separately. For the sky exposure you use a star tracker that locks onto the sky as it rotates to prevent the stars from trailing (which of course causes the foreground to be blurry). Then you shoot the foreground without the tracker and line them up the way they would have if it was a single exposure.
In the image you can see the Orion Nebula bottom center, horsehead and the flame nebulae above it, Barnard's loop nebula faintly circling around all of those. On the right you have two bright orange objects which are Mars and Aldebaran along with the "green" comet as it fades away!
Yeah of course! Shot on my Sony a7iv + 24mm GM lens
Sky: 4ish minutes (4x60s) stacked & tracked on my iOptron Skyguider Pro
Ground: 3 minutes, single exposure
iso 640, f/2.8 for both sky and ground
Processed in Astro pixel processor, Pixinsight, and then Photoshop and LR Classic.
This is what 7 minutes of exposure time looks like on a dark, moonless night at Zabriskie Point, Death Valley (USA)!
This is what 20 minutes of exposure time looks like in the beautiful mountains of Colorado!
Here's what a super-long exposure can reveal in Grand Teton National Park on a moonless, clear night!
This is what 13.5 minutes of exposure time looks like on a dark, moonless night in North Dakota.
peeweekid OP t1_jdxfufx wrote
Reply to comment by Euphoric_Station_763 in This is what 7 minutes of exposure time looks like on a dark, moonless night at Zabriskie Point, Death Valley (USA)! by peeweekid
Oh yes, it's quite crazy how much we can capture which we can't see ourselves!