In the southern hemisphere, we are very lucky to have the milky way core setting horizontally in the western skies towards the latter end of the season (The Milky Way season runs roughly from March to October – outside of these months the core is only above the horizon during the day time). This extra width and positioning mean shooting panoramas are ideal. My favourite lenses for pano’s are either a 35mm or 20mm, with the 20mm being used for this particular image. 20mm is wide angle but the sheer size of the core means that you need to take multiple shots to capture it all. I used 2 rows of 8 shots, where each position was a stack of 4 shots (used to reduce noise). Even when cropped down this image is still 113 megapixels. So that’s 16 positions, and 4 shots in each one – 64 images, each of which was 15 seconds. That’s 16 minutes of shooting! Add this to all the other time spent planning, preparing, travelling, setting up, shooting other compositions, post processing etc etc, and you it makes this find of photography even more unique! A lot of effort but when you’re under cloudless and beautiful dark skies, it doesn’t feel like it….!