Milky Way After The Blizzard

Snow covered ocean cliffs under the stars in Maine

The Milky Way rises over snow covered cliffs on the coast of Maine after the recent blizzard.

Nikon Z8 with NIKKOR Z 35mm f/1.8 S lens.

Sky: Star stack of a bunch of exposures, I took 55 and I may have used all of them but I don’t remember! All shots at f/2.5 (for sharper stars), 8 seconds, ISO 6400.

Foreground: Single exposure at f/2.8, 4 minutes, ISO 1600.

All images were taken in the same spot on the same night. After stacking the star exposures in Starry Landscape Stacker (Mac only, use Sequator on Windows) I did some basic edits in Lightroom Classic, and then ran that result through StarNet2, a free program that removes stars giving you a starless image and a star mask. This allows editing the image without affecting the stars (blowing them out, losing star color, etc) so that you can really bring out detail in the sky, and then add the stars back later by putting the star mask as the top layer in Photoshop using the Screen blend mode.

I also did basic edits on the foreground image in Lightroom Classic before bringing that into Photoshop to blend with the sky image.

Check out my book Night Sky Photography: From First Principles to Professional Results or my free Milky Way Crash Course webinar to learn all about star stacking, camera gear, and more techniques.

Learn about my editing techniques in my Milky Way Master Class.

Ready for action? Join me in person on my 2026 Maine Milky Way workshops, for icebergs in Newfoundland , or fall colors in Nova Scotia.