Mount Aspiring - Liverpool Hut

New Zealand's Southern Alps probably is one of the greatest places in

the world to view the night sky, especially in early July each year,

because during this period, every night, from 12:00am, the Milky Way

centre would move down towards the west, which makes the stunning

Milky Way become paralleling with the west faced mountain ridges.

 

After doing precise study, I decided to take this advantage and climb

to some high place in Mount Aspiring.

 

Climbing to Liverpool Hut needs some effort - one has to first hike 8

km starting Aspiring Hut along West Matukituki Valley Track, then

climb 1.2 km with 530 meters elevation gain, then hike another 2 km

along the mountain ridge before reaching the hut. But the reward is

tremendous: the grand view over the valley is just amazing.

 

I took this photograph at 1.40am on 6 July 2016, while the Milky Way

centre had moved towards the west just above the mountain ridge. The

tiny Liverpool Hut down the valley illustrated the scale of this giant

mountain range. The far left side red light was from Wanaka downtown -

60 km away from Mount Aspiring.

 

This panorama image was a result of 8 successive shots stitching

together covering 180 degree wide view from left to right.

 

Thanks for viewing this image.

Beautiful indeed. Your planning paid off I'd say. You were also rather lucky that the hut below had no lights burning.

One question for you: I assume you exposed for maybe 15 - 30 seconds per shot. That would mean the entire sequence takes you probably between 3 - 6 minutes to complete - longer if the camera applies long exposure noise reduction. During that time the stars move. Did you do anything special when stitching the eight images together, or does it not matter in the real world?

Christoph

 

Thanks for looking at this image. Here is what I did: 4 shots for the sky, each at ISO3200，30 seconds. These shots sufficient to cover the entire sky what I wanted to include in the final image. Then 4 shots for the mountain and foreground, ISO 1600, 5 minutes each, with noise reduction on, so each took 10 minutes to complete. I took the 4 sky shots first, that took 2 minutes in total. Then the 4 mountain foreground shots took 40 minutes to complete. There were no issue for stitching the 4 sky shots together.

Wow this is an incredible photo