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The July 2007 issue of Astronomy magazine contains an article about Brian Skiff, the LONEOS observatory, and the hunt for near earth objects. Editor, Daniel Pendick, contacted me for more information about this evening at Anderson Mesa when Brian offered a tour of the observatory and what he does there. I went out to the observatory in February and took some photos to submit for the article, and this is the one they chose to use.

What I wanted to do was to capture the dome lit naturally by the winter Milky Way, and capture a rich starry sky behind it. I took shots facing north, south and west. The south facing shot had the most potential, so it's the one I put the most effort into. Light pollution from Phoenix, 100 miles to the south, can be seen as a yellowish glow between the trees. If you click on the image to view a larger version, you can see several excellent open clusters scattered around the Milky Way. Sirius is to the right just above the trees, and Procyon is the second brightest star further up.

If there were a camera that could capture a bright, deep image of the sky in less than 30 seconds, I could shoot both foreground and background in one image. (Not that I could come close to affording such a camera if it existed.) So what I did was to shoot a few still images of the foreground (10 minutes per exposure), and then shoot a few equatorially tracked images from the same position to capture the stars and Milky Way (again 10 minutes per exposure). I then stacked both of those sets to average out the noise. This led to the hard part of masking the foreground over the background to generate a crisp image of both parts. More information and sample images before processing and compositing can be found here.