With age comes invisibility – an infrared Milky Way…

Taking infrared photos often doesn’t give you a lot to work with in post-processing; if you’re only allowing a very small portion of invisible light and NO visible light to reach your camera sensor, the results are going to be fairly limiting, from an exposure, contrast, and color perspective. Those of us who shoot infrared realize this, which is my many infrared shooters choose to convert their photos to monochrome. This also is why the vast majority of infrared shooters take photos during the day.

But the results that can be achieved by shooting infrared at night can be…well…interesting. I took this infrared panorama in April of 2017, and you can see many of the familiar objects of the night sky. Notable is the bright Antares (mid right), which still looks the red-orange color you’ve come to expect. However, you can also see how strangely infrared rendered the rest of the night sky. Airglow seems to disappeared entirely. And of course the spring vegetation in the desert has fluoresced into some really interesting colors.