Editing astro photography...

After watching an inspiring talk on the benefits of landscape & nature photography by Thomas Heaton, Tom Walsh & I headed to Beacon Fell just before sunset to attempt some astrophotography.
Technology has made this type of photography much more efficient, with augmented reality apps allowing you to know exactly where the milky way and other star formations are within seconds.
This technology also handed us the knowledge that the Milky Way isn't perfectly visible at this time of year and won't be until around February.
This didn't deter us from practising our skills ready for when we have prime conditions.

I only got one decent shot from the whole night but I could see a nice glimpse of the Milky Way (decent enough for a first attempt) on the back of my display.
A lot of astro photo images are edited in some way so I decided to blog about the quick edit I did.

The original images as uploaded into Lightroom.

Firstly, due to the white balance being on when I shot, the sky had a purple hue to it which was accurate to how I saw the scene so I decreased the temperature to take it back to the blue I remember.

I then increased the contrast a fair bit to give extra punch to the stars.

I then added some clarity to the image and a load of saturation to make the blue look even better. 

I then toyed with the sharpening and noise reduction gently to counteract some of the grain caused by shooting on a higher than usual ISO.

Finally I cropped the image to give it a better composition. 

The final image.

Overall I am happy with the result for a first attempt seeing as though it is not the best time of year to photograph the Milky Way. With some more practise between now and February I should be ready to take some impressive photographs when the conditions are right.