And it was a pretty nice vacation, too.

[rickwayne]

There is actually a dark-sky park in Wisconsin, Bortle 1-2, up in Door County. I hauled my wife up there for a few days, figuring we could have fun during the days, I'd image and she'd play Horizon Zero Dawn at night, and I would sleep when we got home.

If you look carefully you can see that the first image's field of view is almost contained in the second's; they were both shot with Pentax APS-C DSLRs, the Rho/Antares with a 50mm f/4 macro and the Milky Way with a 14mm Rokinon. The first one was mounted on my CEM70 with autoguiding and used a variety of exposures for about two hours of integration time, the second one was propped on a crate (I ran out of tripods) and was around a hundred 20" subs.

The third and fourth images will be my "dirty laundry", the whackadoodle stuff I had to work with out of integration. I'll post those in a moment, just to show that you can actually extract a usable image out of data that seem impossible at first glance.

Edited June 21, 2021 by rickwayne
Added "before" pictures