I imaged the Milky Way on two separate nights during the 2026 Chile AP trip. First, on the night of 17 March 2026, with Victoria. Second on my last night in San Pedro – ironically, just like 2025, I debated about doing DSO imaging on the last night and decided (wisely) to pack up my DSO equipment during the day and spend my last night imaging the Milky Way, to facilitate an on-time departure for the Calama airport.
The gallery with this year’s Milky Way images is: https://beersastrophotography.com/gallery/milky-way-over-space-atacama-lodge-chile-2026/ Here’s the “rest of the story” of how the images came to be…
I imaged the Milky Way on two separate nights during the 2026 Chile AP trip. First, on the night of 17 March 2026, with Victoria. She was awed and enthralled with the Milky Way’s (and the Southern Hemisphere’s sky’s) beauty and was interested in being a part of the capture process. Second, on my last night in San Pedro. Ironically, just like in 2025, I debated with myself about doing DSO imaging on the last night, but ended up deciding (wisely) to pack up my DSO equipment during the day and spend my last night concentrating on capturing the Milky Way, to facilitate an on-time departure for the Calama airport.
On St. Patrick’s Day, Victoria and I made a trip to the Ojos del Salar (https://sanpedroatacama.com/tourist-attraction/ojos-del-salar-3/ ) to check it out and inquire about photographing the Milky Way reflecting in its waters. We found the site. It’s not very far from the Lodge, although the route follows dirt roads that might (okay, would) have been challenging to find and navigate in the dark. The ojos (eyes) were beautiful, as were the reflections you could see in them. But, we were told they close at 19:00CDT. That closing time, when it wasn’t getting dark until 20:30CDT, combined with the gate that we drove by, a good distance from the Ojos (and clearly there to keep you out of the area after they close), made the idea of a Milky Way reflection image infeasible. BTW – you are NOT allowed to go into the water – so perhaps the guy pictured on the website jumping into the Ojos is the one who ruined it for the rest of us!
So, rather than risking an international incident or landing in a Chilean jail, we abandoned the Milky Way reflecting in the Ojos del Salar idea and decided to use the Atacama Lodge as our Milky Way foreground. On the evening of 17 March 2026, once I got the Southern Cross going capturing the Southern Cross (yes!), I assembled the Milky Way capture equipment (Canon EOS Ra camera with 14mm lens on a tripod controlled with a hand-held remote). We set up outside our Lodge facing toward the little hut in its backyard with the Milky Way framed vertically to its east and captured about 100 x 15 second subframes to create this image…
On the last night of the 2026 Chile AP trip, although I debated with myself (as I’d done in 2025!), I finally decided that packing up all my DSO imaging equipment in the morning and getting to the airport in time (even though I wasn’t going to have the battery debate this year), wasn’t a good idea. So, I packed up my DSO equipment during the last full day and readied the Milky Way imaging equipment to spend my last night of the trip focused on capturing the Milky Way.
I planned (and took some framing shots during the day) an image of the Milky Way over the brick oven behind our lodge. When I started imaging that framing after dark, with the Milky Way in it, I found it wasn’t what I’d envisioned using PhotoPills Night AR. So, I only took 3 subframes and switched to an alternate framing. After processing the brick oven image (shown as this Blog’s feature image – at the top of the page), I wished I had taken more subframes, to help eliminate some of the noise! I really like the brick oven as the foreground, so that will be on next year’s capture list – perhaps in landscape mode to eliminate all the “dead space” at the top of the portrait framing (the reason I abandoned the framing that night)!
The alternate framing and the one that I concentrated the night’s efforts on, was similar to my 2024 image looking to the south, with the Milky Way filling the frame horizontally (and the Large Magellanic Cloud peeking out from behind the lodge’s hut).
