May 16, 2015, 12:29 – 01:16 AM

This is a panorama of the Milky Way over Boulder Beach in Acadia National Park during a night sky workshop that I taught last year. I set my tripod in a natural bowl in the boulders on the beach and shot two spheres: one exposed for the sky and one exposed for the ground and refocused on the boulders. I blended the images together in Photoshop first via masks, then stitched them with PTGui Pro. I left the tripod in the nadir to show what a properly calibrated nodal slide should look like after stitching; it should be a smooth circle with no sawtooths. In fact, I hardly needed any control points at all in PTGui as it was already nearly perfectly aligned before stitching. I waited until the Big Dipper was outlined by the trees in the opposite direction of the Milky Way’s arch before shooting the panorama.