Path to the Milky Way

The story behind the photo

A farm track runs between two banks of dry grass and ends at a single broad tree, and directly above that tree the galaxy was standing almost upright. The alignment is not luck: it is the reason I chose this track and this night.

I framed vertically so the composition could hold both the ground and the full arch of the core. The track enters at the bottom, narrows, meets the tree at roughly a third of the height, and everything above that belongs to the sky.

The image was neither generated by artificial intelligence nor assembled from different scenes. It is a stack of twenty-two exposures taken one after another, from the same spot, with the same framing, in a single session. This technique, common in astrophotography, reduces digital noise, compensates for the apparent motion of the stars and brings out the detail of the Milky Way, while keeping a natural look.

The Paris region is a difficult place for a night sky, and there is always a glow on the northern horizon. Finding a lane dark enough, on a moonless night, with clear air and the core still high, takes far more patience than the picture suggests. It was the night of 7 to 8 August 2026, between 11:40 pm and 12:50 am, on the track that starts at the Orme au Berger cemetery. Standing under that sky while the exposures follow one another is worth every bit of that.

This photograph was published as a full page in Magny Mag’ No. 288 (October 2026), the municipal magazine of Magny-les-Hameaux, the town where it was taken.