Welcome to the sixteenth edition of our User Story series.

This time, we're traveling to the coast of Crete, Greece, where Dimitris Petikopoulos(@cap10pixel) used a 40mm lens to reveal the intricate structure of the vertical Milky Way core, while preserving the green airglow and quiet coastal landscape that surrounded it.

✨ The Lens That Changed the Night

That night in Crete, I carried two lenses to the beach: the 14mm I used for most of my Milky Way photographs, and the Sigma Art 40mm f/1.4.

At around 2 a.m, almost as an afterthought, I decided that I could not leave without taking a few frames with the 40mm.

Unlike my wider compositions, I wanted this image to concentrate on the structure and detail of the vertical Milky Way core.

However, I did not want a clinical close-up that ignored the night surrounding it. I also wanted to preserve the atmosphere of the scene: the green airglow, the soft glow of the stars and the quiet coastal landscape beneath them.

At 40mm, tracking becomes considerably less forgiving, while the heavy Sigma requires a stable setup. The NOMAD, wedge, polar-alignment pointer and leveling base provided a stable, aligned platform, allowing me to collect eight minutes of tracked sky data.

I captured the foreground separately with a two-minute exposure and blended in additional narrow-band data during processing.

That last-minuteswitch to 40mm produced one of my favorite photographs from the trip.

📝 Field tip

1.Level Before You Align

Level the platform first, then use the pointer to get close to Polarisand the wedge to fine-tune the polar alignment. 

2.Check Before You Commit

At 40mm, inspect the firsttracked exposure carefully before committing to the full sequence.

📷 Capture details

1.Sky: 8 minutes total integration, tracked · ISO 1250 · f/1.4

2.Foreground: 2 minutes · ISO 1250 · f/1.4

3.Narrow-band: 30 × 3 minutes · 90 minutes total · ISO 3200 · f/1.4

4.Focal length: 40mm