Make a stunning skyscape

Combine the night sky and landscape to brilliant effect

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Combining images of our night sky with beautiful Earth-based landscapes is a rewarding experience that celebrates our place in the Universe.

My 'Tasman Gems' image, the winner in the Skyscapes category of 2024's Astronomy Photographer of the Year, captures a part of the Milky Way seen from the Southern Hemisphere that includes Orion, the Magellanic Clouds and the red Gum Nebula. It's roughly 180° wide and blends separate panoramas of the foreground and sky - a mosaic of nine and 31 sub-frames, respectively. I used an astro-modified Nikon Z6, Nikon Z7 and lenses to capture my sub-frames and a star tracker for the sky panorama.

To create the two start mosaics (above), I used the image-stitching program PTGui. However, here I'll focus on the steps I then took to blend them together, and some (though not all!) of my processing steps.

I used Photoshop for the blending. Once you have your sky and foreground images, load them as layers by clicking File > Scripts > Load Files into Stack, and navigate to your files' location. Your images will load on top of each other in the Layers section.