So each exposure was a “consolidated” one, for both the sky and the earth?
I’m absolutely no expert on this, but most of the shots like this I’ve seen where the capture was described used a separate exposure for the terrestrial part, and mask-combined it with the sky stack…
I see three distinct areas which I would have treated separately. I would take the skyscape from 4 and composite it with the mountains/city and water from 2 and then lay the left side foreground from either 3 or 5 over all of that.
That said, your shot is awesome!
Lastly, the reflections on the lake are a bit distracting, especially the streaks on the right side going at an angle different from the ones on the left.
Good point, I could try to re-project the image to make them straight. Not sure if it would improve things but could be interesting.
Which has totally wrong colors. Only 1% of the stars in the night sky are blue. Most of them are yellow or orange. Jonas wants to create a milkyway picture with psychedelic colors, like a landscape photo with pink trees (who doesn’t like pink trees …)
There is an interesting discussion to be had about how such a scene would be perceived by a human if it was brighter or our eyes more sensitive. But that’s not my goal here. Neither do I am for it to be psychedelic, I’m just trying to cram more data into the picture in a pleasing way a bit like what HDR does for dynamic range but applied to the colors in the image as well. I don’t want to distort things for the sake of distorting them or make the result look like the viewer is on a trip.
@ggbutcher Yes it’s one set of 9 exposures. I then align and stack them once for the foreground and once for the sky. Process them independently and blend the results together again.
@grsnovi Nice idea with blending them. I guess some care would be required because they have a different white balance in cases but could be interesting.
Roger Clark, an astronomer who posts on the astrophotography forum at DPReview, has advised folk to set daylight WB for the capture and to use that as the reference for “realistic” star color. Kinda makes sense to me, as it’s just pretty much daylight from far, far, away… His photographs tend to be warm-ish, not so much from the stars but from the dust and clouds.
Hello. Nice images.
I can give you a tip.
Except for some objects, comet, planetary nebula, Aurora … There’s no green hue in the sky. Here, your stars are a bit green. There is a algorithm in SIril you should use to remove this hue. But apply it on the sky only (so make a composition with GIMP masks).
Cheers,
I’ve spent quite a bit of time on his website. I think there is some point to using daylight as reference specially if the image is viewed in complete darkness or to make image comparable.
From what I understand Chromatic Adaption / Color Constanct is a fairly complex process in the visual system depending on more than just the adaption of our cones and rods. But as mentioned above, I don’t understand enough to make a robust argument regarding that. But just picking a single global fixed white balance for all capturing and displaying scenarios seems to be a bit simplistic.
@lock042 Correct me if I’m wrong but at least in theory air glow would be contributing green no? Airglow - Wikipedia
Yes sure, but in your case stars are green. And for me that’s not nice :).
Makes sense, thanks for the feedback! I think that could be turned into an interesting constraint, to try and keep the color of the stars on the color spectrum of black body radiation. 
Wow, I clearly don’t have an eye for detail.
I think that’s the thing with photography and final images, I’m not so technically focused, rather I like to adjust things until I see something I like.
It’s a bit like Wine, I drink what I like, mostly based on what the label looks like, but many are well versed in the intricacies of wine making and can deconstruct the subtleties that I simply quaff.
I did have another look at the two images and can see what you mean… the control of the bloom in the lights did mean less colour in the MW. For me, the MW in the first image overcame the bright lights in the town.
That’s interesting.
So again, there’s the technically correct, or the visually pleasing in terms of the processing and the viewer. 
The moonless night sky is rarely or never black or blue. Actually it is really colorful! The colors in the night sky have a physical reason, but most night sky pictures you see in the web have an artistic color grading, mostly blue. Most of the time people don’t know how to fix light pollution. The easiest way is to make the image blue!
The reason why our sky is blue during day time is Rayleigh Scattering. Rayleigh scattering increases in efficiency as the wavelength of light becomes shorter. Blue light has a shorter wavelength than red, green or yellow light. So our daytime is blue due to the scattered light, the moonless night still has a tiny amount of blue scattered light, but it is much fainter than the starlight. There is also Airglow and in the very south or north aurora light, which is brighter than the Rayleigh scattered light from stars.
The colors we find in the night sky are from:
To capture natural color of the moonless night sky, set your camera to daylight white balance! A lot of people use artistic values of 3800K but then the stars do not have their natural color nor the night sky. Well if you want to have an artistic night sky then you can do that, but why should I change the beautiful colors of the night sky and turn them into blue? Do you make trees pink in your landscape photographs?
For fixing colors you can use the stellar classification of well known stars you see in your picture and convert that value to Lab or RGB. Then check it in your image and adjust it accordingly.
(HINT: You can find the Stellar classification in Stellarium …)
…but then the stars do not have their natural color nor the night sky.
The funny thing is that objects or point sources do not have a ‘color’ in isolation because color involves perception by a human - and things get tricky at night for the Human Visual System.
Pretend that you have a camera with Spectral Sensitivity Functions identical to cone fundamentals. Its output is then one single matrix multiplication away from a colorimetric color space like Adobe RGB. During the day that matrix multiplication can be roughly broken down into two components: one from cone fundamental space to Adobe RGB, one to account for human adaptation and the fact that said human is most likely not bathed in D65.
When I ask this of Color Scientists I usually get answers with a lot of hand waving and many words like psycho-visual field, local energy, scotopic/mesopic thresholds, etc. They then typically abruptly walk away muttering equations under their breath and the need to perform qualitative/quantitative studies. They disappear in their labs, never to be seen or heard of again. Word is that many have since gone mad.
Any of you scientists out there willing to take this challenge up?
Jack
PS: I like number two best, subjectively
First of all… This capture is so gorgeous! Great work.
I like the second one best. In general, I’m a bit thrown off by the color of stars, but it’s not too weird. Just a touch, which can be still very pleasing for someone.
Anyhow… there’s a thing I want to ask. As I first looked at this picture, I’ve had immediately the impression that the location looks familiar. It’s a couple of days now that I’m trying to figure out, but I can’t grasp yet… Could you share what lake and town they are?
I really think I know it but it doesn’t come to my mind… Getting mad… 
To capture natural color of the moonless night sky, set your camera to daylight white balance! A lot of people use artistic values of 3800K but then the stars do not have their natural color nor the night sky. Well if you want to have an artistic night sky then you can do that, but why should I change the beautiful colors of the night sky and turn them into blue? Do you make trees pink in your landscape photographs?
I try to avoid pink trees, but just applying a daylight white balance in this case does actually turn the tree lines into some odd shade of red.
I think the prevalence of the blue / yellow color grade might also have some other reasons like the Purkinje Effect. Color Constancy might have another interesting role to play, because we mostly perceive the color of the sky at day time we have an expectation that it is blue.
I made another interesting but purely subjective observation in bed last night. The room was dark with only a bit of light coming in from the sodium street lamp. The light from the outside had a orange hue, the darker parts of the room appeared blue in contrast.
I had a bit of time to look into the colors of the stars, part of the problem is the aberrations of the lens another big one lies in my processing to reduce the light pollution and bring up the brightness of the fainter features compared to the stars. There is definitely room for improvement there.
I think the way I subtract the air pollution using a low cut filter might also not be optimal and have a part in the red, cyan, magenta gradient.
Here is an attempt with a white balance closer to daylight, a slightly improved process and less color distortions. There definitely is something to the almost monochromatic look it gives
It also definitely still needs a bit more work to match the foreground to the sky it looks very cut out in places.
@billznn
It’s taken from the Axenstrasse looking towards Altdorf. So I’m nearly certain you’ve been there given that you are Italian and based in Zurich.
@Jonas_Wagner I like the latest version much better.
Here is a good very good read: Articles: Clarkvision.com
Clark his milky way photographs are simply stunning. Clark also updates his website with new articles so it is a good idea to revisit it often
You say you did 9 exposures. Did you do them on a fixed tripod? Could you document the steps you did in Siril (it sounds like you did it without any dark frames).
Stunning composition!!! Beautiful execution.
The only small bits of feedback i can possibly think is
PS. I do like the first variation the best. #3,4,5 just feel like filtered variations of that image to me. #1 has the best sense of atmosphere, both figuratively and literary. I like that feeling of atmospheric haze hanging over the town, it fights overall contrast of an image but i think it adds a lot.
Really just a gorgeous shot. Bravo!
I’m familiar with Clarks articles and I also enjoy his results quite a lot. But good point about revisiting them.
You say you did 9 exposures. Did you do them on a fixed tripod?
Fixed is maybe a slight overstatement. Yes, I worked without a tracker but the very light Sirui travel tripod that I use is not exactly sable in windy conditions. I’m actually surprised that worked as well as it did.
Could you document the steps you did in Siril
I will do that once I’m done iterating. There are also some details which I still need to read up on, especially regarding color management. In my preferred world I would keep the image linear, not corrected for black or white point and in camera neutral white balance until after stacking but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet nor if it actually yields any benefits.
As it stands it’s far from a perfect process but the simplicity is somewhat attractive, probably even more so for beginners.
(it sounds like you did it without any dark frames)
I did do it without dark frames - because I forgot to capture them. With the fixed camera moving sky it’s not so bad as single pixel defects can still be rejected because the sky is moving over the sensor the more low frequency thermal effects remain however. They get partially removed by the low cut I use to remove light pollution but I still see some artifacts that likely come from thermal noise in frequencies between what the stacking/rejection removes and what the low cut cuts.
Looking at the more daiylight whitebalanced version again today it looks a bit like a scene in Mordor.
@PhilipB Thanks for the feedback. I plan to redo the foreground once I’m happy with the sky so that comes in handy.
Oh man… now I see! So, it’s around Brunnen, a bit southern I guess. I’m going along that side of that lake so often… that’s why it was a familiar view 
