Burning tree

Great density and details, with Milky Way on the "winter" side of the tree...fascinating!

I don't know how you made it, Joachim, but the image is really beautiful. Lights are splendid behind a minimalist silhouette. Bravo!

Fantástica !

Explendid nightshot.

The most that I admire of it are the stars fixed against the yellow horizont?

Wonderful photo and a beautiful night scene.

I want to like it, but it just has "blend" written too prominently for me to simply ignore.

Blended or not, it's still very nicely done

Looks GREAT! Very good work!

Beautifully done!  I like the suggestion of a reflection of the tree's shape repeated in the "shadows" of the Milky Way

I feel the same way as Stephen. 

There's nothing wrong with blending especially two apparently good standalone pictures, but maybe that's the point - they're individually good but perhaps ordinary, and by blending these two in particular, and the manner in which they were blended, it creates the perception of an awkwardly "summed" composite that accentuates the strength of neither. 

As I said before, I do want to like this image -- photographs of stars in the Milky Way are among my favorites, something I'd love to be able to photograph myself.  But if a blend distorts the night sky in a way that is totally unnatural, how can we say that it is "well done?"  That's just beyond me.

I once got out of my sleeping bag at 1:00 a.m. while camped in the middle of nowhere on the Missouri River in central Montana, and I just sat in a camp chair for the next four hours wrapped in my bag and watched the stars in the Milky Way slowly move overhead (while listening to the coyotes in the surrounding hills and unseen geese on the river).  What really impressed me was how the stars started to wink out even before I could detect any hint of a rising sun on the eastern horizon.  When I finally could see an exceedingly faint glow of the coming sun, the vast majority of the Milky Way stars had disappeared from view -- it didn't take much light to overpower them.  Perhaps because I had that experience, the impossibility of this photograph by Joachim seems overwhelming.  He may as well have colored the sky green, it is just that obvious to my eyes.  

It's rare for people in urbanizing areas to see a really dark sky any longer, and a majority of the world's population live in such areas.  Perhaps that's what makes this image to seem possible to many viewers.

The colours are lovely, but overall, the image looks like an ordinary landscape mixed with a photo made by the Hubble space telescope.  Pretty?  Yes.  Realistic?  No.