A late-spring visit to the southwest provided the perfect opportunity to experience the amazingly-dark skies there. In this small town in southwest New Mexico, the skies were *very* dark. Bortle scale 2 dark.. to the point where the Milky Way can cast a shadow from objects on the ground. The nearly magical properties of the Sony a7S ii made this essentially “point and shoot” easy when it came to revealing the splendor of the Milky Way. The small amount of light pollution seen is actually from Deming over 60 miles away, and possibly also Las Cruces and El Paso, over 120 miles away.
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Sony a7S ii
Sony FE 35mm f/1.4 ZA set to f/2
8 second exposure ISO 10,000
pano of 6 frames, edited in Photoshop CC