Nice job on the milky way, that’s the colour and look I prefer and was trying to get myself in my efforts.
Isn’t the “Lavender” tinting ironic? 
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Here is my first attempt, using PhotoFlow and G’MIC:
The foreground is still too dark for my taste, but I am trying to avoid any visible sky/mountains transition.
For the sky/mountains separation, I have used a combination of a bilateral-blurred luminosity mask and few gradients… of course, that’s the most tricky part of the edit.
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Thanks @agriggio, I’ll have a go with this, though possibly not for a couple of days.
I didn’t think of purple fringing, doh!
I was a little bilaterally blurred on new year’s eve.
It’s many years for me already, and things are not improving… 
Appropriate?
Yeah. I think.
I thought RegiStax had been used to remove or reduce star trails by some users. But, alas, my research is not encouraging. I did read many reports of doing a translation of a few pixels with a minimum blend mode. I also saw references to using a Richardson Lucy deconvolution in GIMP. But I didn’t find enough information to be helpful.
R-L deconvo. can be had by loading the GMIC module, opening the ‘details’ tree, and selecting that sharpening mode. My edit above uses that sharpening mode (on both original and output) as made available in Rawtherapee My Shot of the Year - #38 by HIRAM
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I’ve had some good success with the Vixen Polarie tracker, which has sidereal (star), solar, lunar, and 1/2 siderial tracking rates. Runs off AA batteries or mini-USB input. I’ve been using their earlier version polar alignment scope. It’s run by a stepper motor and precision brass worm drive gearing.
I can also supply power with a Makita LXT 4 amp/hour tool battery and ADP05 USB adapter with two USB outputs.
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Looking forward to giving this a try
Got my edit online. If you’ve got the time to watch, I’d love feedback. Especially this is by far the most knowledgeable community I belong to.
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Great fun to see so many different interpretations of this picture, especially since it’s a dark and noisy shot that demands an artistic and personal touch. I’m joining the fun with my own interpretation, edited on an old, uncalibrated and way to warm display. I decided to keep the scene rather dark to hide the most difficult noise.
EDIT: Here is my XMP file in case someone wants to take a look: 2016-07-26-23-40-37-0.ARW.xmp (12.3 KB)
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so dramatic
@harry_durgin impressive photograph! Thanks a lot for sharing it. The reflection of the milky way in the water is mesmerizing.
Two different versions were developed with rawtherapee and then fused in GiMP.
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I really like your Milky Way palette
Something not related to the picture but to better understand what we see I can suggest to watch:
The Universe Is, Like, Seriously Huge - Stuff in Space Is Far Away – but How Do We Know?
I found it very interesting and it explains the colors you see 
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Really like your version and got some fresh ideas from your pp3, so thanks! I added some wavelet edge sharpening and changed the resize sharpening to RLD and got a little more bite (not that it’s necessary)… Curious what you or anyone thinks about it… (You’d have to change the Velvia film emulation back to your location…)
https://filebin.net/oy6hrdlajeajh4wf/2016-07-26-23-40-37-0.ARW.pp3
Thanks for the feedback! I tried your pp3, but I had to manually turn on wawelets, otherwise I was not seeing any difference. After that, indeed the extra sharpening is noticeable (a little bit), thanks for that! I usually never go to wavelets, because I don’t understand them
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Dear @harry_durgin,
thank you very much for the picture. Most of the stuff I know about darktable, I learned from you. Since I got a new camera I’m trying to shoot the milkyway. However I don’t have that good results yet.
What lens did you use to shoot the picture?
Here is my edit with natural color of the night sky:
2016-07-26-23-40-37-0_01.ARW.xmp (15.0 KB)
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