Milky Way Banon

During my 2019 holiday in Banon, Southern France, I took advantage of the dark rural skies to capture a wide-field image of the Milky Way using my mobile DSLR setup. The resulting panorama spans a rich section of the night sky, stretching all the way from Cygnus—with the loose open cluster Messier 39—down to Scutum, where the dense star field around Messier 11 (the Wild Duck Cluster) marks the transition toward the bulge of the Galaxy. This region is packed with emission nebulae, star-forming complexes, dark dust lanes, and countless unresolved stars, making it one of the most rewarding parts of the Milky Way to observe and photograph. The dry summer nights in Banon offered excellent transparency, allowing the intricate structure of the Galactic plane to stand out beautifully in the final image.

Raw conversion was done with Adobe Lightroom, data calibration, registration and the final processing was done with PixInsight. The result was as follows:

The images were taken with the following equipment:

• Date: 2019
• Location: Banon, France
• Telescope: Canon 24-105
• Focal length [mm]: 24
• Focal ratio: 4
• Mount: Skywatcher Star Adventurer
• Camera: Canon 6D
• Filter: no
• Exposure time [min]: 85
• Resolution: 114″/px