Summer Milky Way with Great Rift and Meteor
Sunday, September 13th, 2026 at 4:12:09 AM · 2026/Astrophotography
This exceptional deep-sky astrophotograph captures the summer Milky Way in extraordinary detail, with the Great Rift — a dark lane of interstellar dust — slicing diagonally across the frame from corner to corner. A bright meteor has been composited back into the final image from its single captured frame, as the stacking process (sigma rejection over 294 × 20-second exposures) removed it as a transient artifact. The warm golden and reddish hues of dense star clouds contrast beautifully against dark dust nebulae and the velvet black of deep space. Totaling 98 minutes of tracked integration at ISO 800 using a Canon EOS R6 Mark II and RF 15-35mm lens at 15mm f/3.5, the image demonstrates masterful long-exposure astrophotography technique. The wide-field perspective emphasizes the sheer scale and complexity of our galaxy's disk as seen from within.
Chronologically Adjacent
