Triple Arch at 4’200m
It took months of planning, three nights of acclimatization at 3,100m, a window that nearly disappeared twice because of wind, a bank holiday that grounded helicopters, a pilot found last minute on the Italian side of the border, temperatures around minus 25°C, a night that got windier than forecasted, and forty hours of editing with a process I had never used before.
What I set out to capture was the double Milky Way arch, the only night of the year where both arms of the Milky Way are visible above the horizon. The winter arch first, then the summer arch carrying the galactic core, from a summit with a view of the Matterhorn that almost no one ever sees.
What I didn’t plan for was the Gegenschein, a rare counterglow caused by interplanetary dust reflecting sunlight, appearing as a third faint arch crossing the frame. A triple arch, in the end.
The final image is a tracked panorama built from over 260 individual exposures: 17 panels for the winter arch and 16 for the summer arch, each panel a stack of 4 frames at 40 seconds, supplemented with H-alpha data, plus 32 landscape shots at nautical twilight. The working folder came to around 300GB.
This is the first generation of women who aren't required to get married to survive. The first time in history women aren't slaves to men. So yes feminism is serious.