This one was more of a technical experiment than an artistic pursuit but, I thinks it’s pretty awesome nevertheless.
For those that are curious I wrote a little description of how I created this photograph on my website: Urban Astrophotography.
For reference here is what it looked like out of camera:
Marvellous!
Very clever…
Thanks - this is a topic I find highly interesting. I’ve got several stacks of Mily Way shots that are (at a minimum) lackluster, and am always on the lookout for new processing techniques that I could use on old photos.
Your technique (Hugin+Siril to align and stack) is one I’ve used, and I was following along right up until
“We remove the ground and stars from the image and then blur it a lot.”
Can you elaborate on this part? What specific tool did you use to remove the ground and stars? Was it automated? Did you just use block fill the ground and use the heal tool for the stars?
Can you elaborate on this part? What specific tool did you use to remove the ground and stars? Was it automated? Did you just use block fill the ground and use the heal tool for the stars?
I used the despeckle filter to remove the stars. As far as I know that’s just a median filter. I’ve got some halo artifacts if I didn’t filter them out. I’m not exactly sure why, at least intuitively the star light should be negligible small compared to the total light pollution. I’ll have to check that again.
For the ground I used one of the G’MIC inpaint versions, transport diffusion or solidify if I recall correctly. It doesn’t have to be pretty it’s just for getting the boundary conditions right for the low pass filter
Cool, thanks. I’m eager to try this out now. 
Very cool!
Great work, thanks for sharing !
I am not sure I understood this part though:
I guess I will just have to try the filters you mentioned above on a sample image
