Suppose I should post a bit more here... Here is my latest milky way image. the stars are a stack of 30x 60s exposures. FOreground is a stack and focus merge of 6 4minute exposures all at ISO 400. Reflection was a pain to add back in because I didn't shoot it separately from the other two sets, foolishly.

[MikeNArk]

Great scene composition and very good capture of the milky way. Excellent work.

[aitrus3]

Great scene composition and very good capture of the milky way. Excellent work.

thanks Mike

[UncleVanya]

Can you expand on how this shot is achieved? Obviously the starts move during the capture of so many images, what is the process to stack and realign them? How did the reflection prove difficult?

[aitrus3]

Can you expand on how this shot is achieved? Obviously the starts move during the capture of so many images, what is the process to stack and realign them? How did the reflection prove difficult?

That's a huge undertaking to expand on at the moment for me. Look up Astrophotography star trackers for milky way and there are a lot of articles on it. For stacking the tracked star shots I use PixInsight.
The reflection was difficult because while star reflections were sharp in the longer tracked exposures, stacking to help reduce noise and bring out detail didn't work. Obviously the untracked 4 minute exposures had a lot of trailing in them. The reflections of the stars were glorious on the perfectly still water. If I had done the work to capture them properly, I wouldn't have had such a hard time and the image would be a better rendition of what the camera saw.

[UncleVanya]

That's a huge undertaking to expand on at the moment for me. Look up Astrophotography star trackers for milky way and there are a lot of articles on it. For stacking the tracked star shots I use PixInsight.
The reflection was difficult because while star reflections were sharp in the longer tracked exposures, stacking to help reduce noise and bring out detail didn't work. Obviously the untracked 4 minute exposures had a lot of trailing in them. The reflections of the stars were glorious on the perfectly still water. If I had done the work to capture them properly, I wouldn't have had such a hard time and the image would be a better rendition of what the camera saw.

I’m familiar with the basic concept. I just wanted to understand how you were doing the basics. I think if I’m understanding you; you used a tracking mount for the main Astro portion of the shot which you then stacked. Then you overlaid that into a longer static shot of the foreground. A little unclear what you did to get the still reflection vs what you “should have done” by your own statement.

[aitrus3]

I’m familiar with the basic concept. I just wanted to understand how you were doing the basics. I think if I’m understanding you; you used a tracking mount for the main Astro portion of the shot which you then stacked. Then you overlaid that into a longer static shot of the foreground. A little unclear what you did to get the still reflection vs what you “should have done” by your own statement.

I didn't get the still reflection. Traditional milky way photography uses short exposures that are stacked which is how reflections are properly captured. While I had decent stars in the reflections of my tracked shots, once stacked, it didn't work out so well as i thought it would. So adding the reflections back in took a lot of work and I had to minimize them significantly due to a number of factors. I also had to keep the reflections of the untracked shots, which showed long trails, so editing those trails out was very time consuming.