I joined three other friends for an all night adventure in Yosemite to shoot the Milky Way. We started at Glacier Point but then decided to make the additional 2 hour trek to Olmsted to catch a better angle. Conditions were near perfect and temperatures were not freezing like last month's night excursion to Tioga Lake...brrr. What's more, nobody fell down the steep granite slope in the dark, though we tried our best. Elevation at this spot was 8,525 ft.
Lens is the FA 31mm f/1.8 Limited on the K3II. I prefer this lens for astro panos. I shot and stitched a series of 50sec stacked images, 33 total (11-frame pano x 3 duplicate exposures each), in order to achieve some subtle noise reduction. This technique (stacking & median blending) works very well.

Editing in PS(CC) and some tweaks using Nik Suite.
Special thanks to Fresno for your ubiquitous yellow glow.
Thanks for looking!
© 2016 Mike Oria Photography