Deneb
Last edited Mon Nov 23, 2020, 09:47 AM - Edit history (1)
It was a crappy night for shooting -- about 75% cloud cover and Class 6 light pollution -- but I really wanted to just practice shooting and stacking images with Sequator before travelling to a dark sky site. About the only clear area was toward Cygnus, so I pointed my 50mm lens that way and took 220 shots at 1.6 sec, ISO 1600. I'm really amazed at how well this technique works: In an area where I could only visually see a half-dozen stars, the stacked images clearly show the Milky Way and several dark nebula "coalsacks" and even a hint of the North America nebula above and a little to the left of Deneb, the bright star near the center. I'm especially amazed at all the star colors. If you haven't tried stacking, it's really fun!
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I hope this is only temporary, because I'd love to see it. Guess I'll check back tomorrow.
I tried to see the photo on my iPhone, and it didn't show there. So I woke up my desktop computer and wow, here it is.
Thanks for sharing and posting.
I look forward to seeing your future photos.
At 1.6 seconds, the exposures are too short to see any star trails with this lens. I could have gone several seconds longer but I'm still experimenting; I was going to do a second set with a longer exposure, but I got cold. 
Stacker programs like Sequator and Deep Sky Stacker actually locate the stars in the images and align them.
I just checked on Google maps, and the Class 1 area I was looking at -- about 15 miles north of Kit Carson -- is actually about 2 hours away. However, I can get to a spot about 15 miles west of Kit Carson in an hour-and-a-half, and although it's rated Class 2, it's almost as dark: artificial brightness of 1.93 ?cd/m^2 versus 1.57 ?cd/m^2 according to lightpollutionmap.info. Compared to the almost 2000 ?cd/m^2 where I live, where this photo was taken, that's almost heaven! 
A few years ago, I went camping in Chaco Canyon, NM, which is an official Dark Sky National Park, and it does have some of the darkest skies I've ever seen -- the Milky Way was so bright, I swear it cast a shadow on a moonless night. They have a small observatory, and an astronomy club from Farmington brings telescopes and give presentations there on Saturday nights during the summer. I literally took a couple of thousand pictures of the ruins there during the day, but only a few 4-second shots of the Milky Way -- at the time, I wrongly assumed that you need a telescope to get any interesting astrophotos, and I didn't know anything about stacking. And, according to the light pollution map, the sky there has an artificial light rating of 7.10 ?cd/m^2, so I'm really looking forward to this trip to Kit Carson!
