



Another shot I’ve reprocessed from September last year out in Donabate (ireland). I originally headed down after the gym one night just to practice foreground compositions with the coastal rocks, nothing more. But when I got there, the clear sky showed real potential, so I ended up shooting a few sky stacks pointing away from the local light pollution while I had the chance.
Looking back through the catalog recently, I realised those frames had far more to offer than I first thought. With my processing skills and workflow evolving over the last year, I decided to run the raw sky data through my updated pipeline to see what I could extract.
Well, this is the result!
📁 Type: Stacked & Blended Panorama
📅 Date: September 25th, 2025
🗺️ Location: Donabate, Co. Dublin
📷 Gear: Nikon D850 (Unmodified) | Sigma 14-24mm f/2.8
⚙️ Sky: 10-frame stack (20mm | 25s | f/2.8 | ISO 2000)
⚙️ Foreground: 2-panel vertical panorama (14mm | 30s | f/8 | ISO 1600)
💻 Workflow: Starry Landscape Stacker > RC-Astro tools > StarNet++ > Lightroom > Photoshop > DBPTools > Lightroom
Can you imagine taking a midnight trip to the toilet, looking up, and seeing this overhead?
Socials:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stefan.ray.photography
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stefan.ray.photography/
When I first took this shot, I assumed this old stone structure was something cool, maybe a gunpowder store or a lookout post for the Martello Tower. But after doing a bit of research, it turns out it was actually the garrison's outdoor toilet (or "privy" 🚽). So while I was out here aiming for a dramatic, historic nightscape, I was basically photographing a 200-year-old bathroom with arguably the best view in North Dublin!
It's wild to think about the layers of history right under this sky. You’re standing on an Iron Age promontory fort, right next to a 19th-century Napoleonic tower, looking up at light that left stars thousands of years ago... all centered around a historic loo.
This is an edit of a panorama of the night sky from a few months ago. I never got around to finishing the edits as I went over this maybe 10 times, refining my workflow over and over to get the data looking right.
The main challenge with my Milky Way data is the lack of clear night skies. The only person I can blame is myself! Shooting just 10 minutes from home in a Bortle 4 sky isn't ideal, but it provides enough data for something I can work with and gives me a great opportunity to repeatedly try different processing approaches. The only thing holding me back is the cloud!
📁 Type: Stacked, Tracked & Blended Panorama
📅 Date: June 15, 2026
🗺️ Location: Loughshinny / Drumanagh, Ireland
📷 Gear: Nikon Z8 (Unmodified) | Viltrox 16mm f/1.8 | MSM Nomad
⚙️ Sky: 5-panel panorama (Each panel stacked from 10 images: 16mm | 60s | f/2.8 | ISO 1600)
⚙️ Foreground: 16mm | 30s | f/5.6 | ISO 1000
💻 Workflow:
Socials:
https://www.facebook.com/stefan.ray.photography
https://www.instagram.com/stefan.ray.photography/
After the solar eclipse earlier that day, I headed out around midnight to find a relatively dark spot along the coast at Loughshinny. I set up two cameras, one running 15-second exposures and the other on 30-second intervals, to cover as much of the night sky as possible over a two-hour window.
Out of nearly 1,000 frames (most filled with plane trails and Starlink satellites!), about 100 captured actual meteors, ranging from subtle streaks to bright fireballs. This final image is a composite blending roughly 30 of the best frames to show the true scale of the shower over the bay.
I’ve also included some raw, straight-off-the-camera files in the carousel so you can see exactly how they looked before processing! 📸➡️
📁 Type: Blended composite
📅 Date: 12th August 2026
🗺️ Location: Loughshinny, Ireland
📷 Camera 1: u/nikoneurope Z8 | u/viltrox.official 16mm f/1.8
📷 Camera 2: u/nikoneurope Z6III | u/sigmaphoto 14-24mm f/2.8 DG DN
⚙️ Sky: 30 frames combined (16mm | 15s | f/1.8 | ISO 1600 & 14mm | 30s | f/2.8 | ISO 2400)
⚙️ Foreground: 16mm | 30s | f/5.6 | ISO 1000
💻 Workflow: Edited in Lightroom, composite blended in Photoshop.
Took this montage from Skerries. what an evening!
Follow me!
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stefan.ray.photography/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stefan.ray.photography/
Not looking good for people in Ireland.
They already offloaded 50 odd engineering staff to Endava and gave them a raw deal.
Socials:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stefan.ray.photography/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stefan.ray.photography/
This has been a goal of mine for the last year or so, but with the lack of clear nights here in Ireland, getting the conditions for this shot has been a struggle.
I headed out last Monday with very little hope around 1am, and then suddenly there it was, the Milky Way arch appeared right in front of me.
This final image is a 51-image UNTRACKED panorama captured from Rush Beach, Ireland.
Built from a 5-panel panorama, with each panel stacked from 10 exposures to reduce noise and recover detail, all shot on a stock Nikon Z8 with no tracker or astro-modification.
📷 Nikon Z8 + Sigma 14–24mm
⚙️ Sky: 5-panel pano • 10-frame stacks per panel
14mm • 15s • f/2.8 • ISO 6000
⚙️ Foreground: 30s • f/2.8 • ISO 1600
Workflow:
• Stacked in Starry Landscape Stacker
• Panorama merged in Photoshop
• Processed in Siril
• Final colour/detail work in Photoshop using Davidboixo DBPtools
• Blended with a separate foreground exposure
Captured: 16 May 2026