This glorious mass of an unimaginable amount of stars is a cross-section of our own galaxy. Ponder that for a moment. This is our own neighborhood, and each of these tiny points of light could have worlds of untold beauty — and life! — orbiting them. It reminds me of a trip that I took, alone, to the Arches National Park in Utah. At around 9pm at night I drove back out to the park, walked in the pitch black under a new moon to find a clearing among the Park Avenue rock formation. I never had, and never have since, seen such an incredible sky. Ink black cloth coated in a diamond glitter.
I didn’t record the exact composition of this image, but it was created using 160 x 300-second exposures using Astrodon RGB filters. The telescope was the beautifully compact WilliamOptics Star-71 (the original 5-element version) and a QSI683WSG camera on an Atlas EQ-G mount. Orchestration of the data acquisition was done with [Sequence Generator Pro](https://mainsequencesoftware.com\), guided by OpenPHD2 and a sneaky little Lodestar X2 on the QSI683. Processing was done in PixInsight and retouched in Photoshop.
Learn more and see a higher-resolution version of this image on its Astrobin page.
