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I was waiting 5 months to be able to take a picture of the Milky Way core.

I live in Hungary, and the Milky Way core is not visible here from around September to January. In February, the Milky Way core is only visible for around half an hour, just before the sunrise.

I was waking up almost every day at 3 AM in February to see if the weather was clear, but until February 29, it was cloudy(even if the forecast said it will be clear) or foggy, or the moon was up.
But on the 29th of February, no clouds or fog was visible, so I took my change.
I went to a less light polluted place, it’s a 20 minute walk from my house, alone, at 3:30 AM. Yes, it was scary, because I was in an empty field next to a forest in pitch darkness, away from my town. But I tried not to think about it, I was just trying to concentrate on the phone and think about how great the picture will turn out.

I set my tripod up, took a couple of test pictures to see what’s the perfect shutter speed/ISO combination, and if the Milky Way was perfectly in frame.

After everything was set up, I shot 40 RAW pictures in 20s shutter speed, 6400 ISO with HedgeCam 2(it doesn’t matter what camera you use though, it just needs to support RAW capture, since none of the xiaomi phones support RAW capturing in the stock camera until the Mi Note 10). The images were taken from 4:20 to 4:46. After 4:46, I could see on the images that the sun was rising, (but I still saw total darkness with my eyes) so I had to stop capturing.

After I got home, I auto aligned the 40 RAW images in Photoshop, then I used Median blending. This method is used in astrophotography to increase the details, and to reduce noise. After that, I reduced the light of the smaller stars, to make the Milky Way “pop”, then I made some final touches in Lightroom, like adjusting the exposure, contrast, color vibration, and adding a bit of dehaze, clarity.

In my opinion, all of the suffering was worth it in the end, because this is the best astro image I have taken 🙂

If you want to see my previous attempts, or follow my future works on capturing the Milky Way, you can follow my public Google photos album here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/qiQotVtLr2f8Exj38