Passing the summit of scenic mountain road, Muzina, between Gjirokastër and Saranda in Albania, I just had to stop to admire the clear night sky with the prominent Milky-way and its core just above the horizon!

With no equipment to track the night sky, I was limited to relative short exposures of 15 seconds to prevent stars from trailing – also I bumped up the ISO to what I consider the maximum reasonable limit of my camera; 6400.
To compensate for the high ISO I shot multiple exposures of 15 seconds (24×15 seconds) so these could be stacked/combined into one common image, resulting in a much cleaner image with a lot less noise than what each “sub-exposure” contains!
Also, combining several sub-exposures is (almost 1-to-1) equivalent to 1 exposure with the same length as the total exposure time of the stack; It will have a smaller dynamic range but with much less noise.

To make the foreground “pop” more, I shot a few longer exposures (6×30 seconds) of the ground (disregarding the trailing stars in the sky).
The sky and the ground were then stacked separately and finally combined into this final night-scape of summit of Muzina Road and the Milky-way!

The light-pollution in the lower sky is the city glow from Saranda behind the mountains some 18 km away.

When coming from the “cold north” it’s such a nice experience to admire (and photograph) the beautiful and starry night sky in shorts and t-shirt!!! 😆