Making my own luck - chasing the Milky Way in Sardinia

Soon after I bought my first "real" camera 11 years ago, I read somewhere that I could take photos of the Milky Way. My early attempts were sad, smeary blurs. But I soon acquired the technique, experience, and gear to take "astro landscapes" of the Milky Way so long as conditions cooperated.

While I brought the right equipment photograph the Milky Way in Sardinia, I have been foiled in turns by the weather, a full moon in the middle of the night, light pollution and a brief stomach bug. But after being here for nearly a month, all the necessary elements came together to enable me to capture the image below above Spiaggia di Tuerredda.

After nearly a month - a proper Milky Way shot in Sardinia

But I'm beginning with the conclusion to the story. The journey made this satisfying, and it began well before I even arrived. It really started when that sneaky enemy, hubris, and I became fast friends earlier this year we'll before I boarded my flight to Italy. My first Milky Way capture of the year was taken handheld in New Zealand at the end of the Hobbiton night tour...

Handheld Milky Way in New Zealand

I realize that while you can do this in the right conditions on your phone, it is actually taking dozens of photos and performing intense computational processing to take those night shots - "straight outta the camera" is actually highly manipulated! If you're curious, this article from dpreview.com does an excellent job of explaining what happens. Taking an actual "single shot" of the Milky Way requires an incredibly dark sky, a camera setting that allows a lot of light to be captured and a really fast lens. Even though I wasn't planning it, I got a decent Milky Way image, and the stage was set for a mindset of "capturing the Milky Way is easy" for 2024.

The end of the trip to New Zealand continued to overboost my confidence. Upon showing up at one of our stops on the multi-day Queen Charlotte Track hike, I woke up in the middle of the night, took a peek outside and realized that I could see the Milky Way without being dark adapted. Right from the balcony of our hotel, I took this time lapse of the galaxy crossing the sky. Note that unlike in the Northern Hemisphere, where the Milky Way is always wider closer to the horizon and narrower as you look up from the horizon, in New Zealand, it is flipped both horizontally and vertically. 

Punga Cove Milky Way timelapse

My luck continued during our annual weeklong trip to Monhegan Island, Maine. There are occasionally years when the whole trip doesn't yield much for the Milky Way, but this year, there were incredibly clear skies on one of the first nights we were there and I got nearly a dozen shots around the Island, including this one over the Fish House sign.

The Milky Way at Monhegan Island Fish Beach this summer

And then I when I hiked to Havasu Falls in the Grand Canyon, I simply started to believe the Milky Way would just show itself for me so long as I had my camera and tripod. The skies were the darkest I've ever seen - as they should be for a spot over a 100 miles (plus a 10 mile hike) from the nearest population center. I was definitely starting to take capturing images from the night sky for granted.

Havasu Falls in the Grand Canyon under the Milky Way

When wearrived in Sardinia, I knew for the first few weeks the moon would be lighting the sky, we would be visiting large population centers and shooting the Milky Way was not going to work. But I figured that being in Sardinia for nearly a month would offer plenty of Milky Way photographing opportunities. 

Oh was I wrong! Cloudy evenings pretty much wiped out nearly two weeks of time after the moon began cooperating and setting early in the evening. And then on the first night with clear, moon-free skies I got a little sick from having a little too much rich food three nights in a row at Laconda di Corte in Bosa.

The next day, I left Bosa for Pula, and that evening, I had a great seafood meal at Fradis Minoris, situated in a lagoon at the end of nearly kilometer long causeway far away from any lights. However, I didn't do my homework Fradis Minoris was closed the next evening along with the causeway leading to it. And the ugly yellow sodium lights near the causeway entrance were so bright I didn’t even bother attempting to photograph the night sky.

Finally on my third day in Pula, I went for a (daytime) bike ride through the lovely town of Tuelada and subsequently went out to the coast and realized that it might be a good spot to shoot the Milky Way. I headed back that evening after dinner and had a great time shooting the night sky, including the capture at the top of this blog entry. Sometimes a slightly more arduous journey makes the shot that much sweeter.