I have not had the success I would like shooting Milkyway and have never attempted a Pano before. A couple weeks ago I went to a Astro Workshop held by Joshua Cripps. It was fantastic! I have never done a workshop before and it gave me the confidence to go out and do photos I am proud of and see my vision through to completion.
This photo was on the last night of the workshop. I had found a place earlier that day and left the group to get the shot I saw in my head. It was ambitious but worked out great.
The foreground is a blue hour blend of 10 x 20mm photos (vertically). The section that was light painted was lit by 7 different lights spread out in areas I wanted to highlight. I held a 12" light tube to get the glow and I would rotate it in my hand in between shots to make sure I would get a shot with the light on me the way I wanted.
I triggered the shots with a remote shutter through my phone which worked fantastic. It is the Foolography trigger and while it is annoyingly glitchy sometimes it allowed me to trigger the shutter in a bracket which is wonderful so I can choose a frame without a blow out from the lights. So for myself I had it set to trigger 7 photos 1/3 of a stop about and took about. 5 or 6 series of brackets. I ended up only having to use 1 frame where my face was lit the way I liked (and one that had minimal motion blur).
The I moved back for the milky way pano (the tripod was set up ver sketchy on some rocks about 10' high, I was on a rock about 15' high.
This is the first time i shot a pano and it was really dark. I did a sweep of the horizon with a single frame just to capture it then went back and did it again getting 6 shots per frame to stack later.
Unfortunately I shot WAY too much over lap. It was so dark I couldn't see what I had already shot. So in the end I have 17 frames of 6 shots where likely 10 would have been fine.
Then images were editted to tast in lightroom and merged for the foreground. Editted in lightroom and stacked in Starry Landscape Stacker and merged to a pano in Photoshop. It went together surprisingly well the worst part was my poor computer merging over 100 files (I used all 17 sets for the milkyway)
For those that stuck around this long, thanks for reading. This was a milestone for me to accomplish and I am happy with the results.
I am super psyched for you! To accomplish something you have dreamed of but not yet done successfully is an awesome achievement. I appreciate all of the information about how you did it/what you used because I would like to try to create a milky way pano one day too! Keep going for it!