California Nebula, Pleiades, and Mount Etna

This time I’m sharing a new image of Etna that I have been trying to for a long time. It’s a little different from my usual shots with the Milky Way, the star trails and the Moon. This is an astronomical landscape of the deep sky! It is a landscape that shows objects from the deep sky as a background. Fear not it is not a photo montage but it was made with an astro-modified camera to reveal the nebula in a short exposure and a complex technique starting from the study of the objects to be filmed, determined the exact focal length and the exact point in which to witness the rise of the Pleiades (right) and the California Nebula (to the left). We are near Monte Turchio and the evening did not look good. The sky was covered by a very thick blanket of clouds but, trusting in the weather forecast, we knew that just before the astronomical dawn of these objects, the sky would clear up and it did. Once again nature has reserved a breathtaking scenery with the south-east crater in partial activity, two lenticular clouds that dominated the top of the volcano and several veils in the sky on which the glow of the incandescent lava inside the active crater was reflected, now the highest peak of the mountain. From that moment on I started shooting the sky chasing the stars and waiting for the frame to clear away any haze. The final image gives us the view of the starry sky as a whole: glazes and objects of the sky and invites us to project ourselves into the depths of the universe and be amazed by the wonders of the cosmos.