Starry sky over the Allgäu - Jochens Pictures

There’s a well-known saying that you should combine the pleasant with the useful. So, what do you do when a business trip of several days promises magnificent photo opportunities including a great starry sky? Exactly: grab your fully packed camera bag!

Off to the Allgäu

Starry night over the Allgäu — Starry night with Milky Way over the Allgäu, with a view of Fischen and Oberstdorf

The company department I work in is spread all over Germany, from Hamburg to Cologne to Munich. Of course, colleagues from the branch offices come to the Darmstadt headquarters from time to time, or we meet at conferences. But having all of the thirty or so colleagues in the same place at the same time usually only happens once a year, at the traditional annual department meeting in March.

Over the past few years, it has proven effective for us to deliberately meet outside of our own company locations, away from the big cities. The idea is to get away from the usual distractions of everyday business and to be able to concentrate fully on working together. Typically, the meetings are on Thursday and Friday, with an optional third day on Saturday, which is usually used for excursions and the like.

In 2019, the choice of location fell on Oberstdorf, more precisely on the “Berghaus Schönblick” at the Söllereck. The last weekend in March was also the last weekend of the ski season. Snow was still abundant, so one colleague had even brought his sled along. But I was interested in something completely different. For all three days, the forecast showed beautiful weather with cloudless skies. And it was a new moon! This promised to the perfect opportunity for great night shots.

Starry, starry night…

Morning dawn over the Allgäu Alps, with a view of the Nebelhorn

While the others from the team sat together in the evenings with various card and board games as well as suitable drinks, I got ready to hike uphill at eleven at night. I put on sufficiently warm clothes, grabbed my camera and tripod, and set off into the snow. It was sufficient to walk a few hundred meters along the edge of the secured ski slope, in the direction of Schrattenwang and the Austrian border, to have a fantastic panorama.

The clear mountain air at 1,400 meters (4,600 feet) above sea level, the dark moonless night and the relatively low level of light pollution this close to the Alps provided the breathtaking starry sky I had hoped for! On one side, you had the view of rugged mountains and a myriad of stars above, on the other side, you could look far over the Allgäu. There, the lights of the towns Fischen and Oberstdorf glowed, and above one could even faintly see the light band of the Milky Way.

From a purely photographic point of view, this was almost a routine task: with the ultra-wide-angle lens purchased especially for such night shots and the starting settings ISO 800, 11 mm, ƒ/2.8 and 25 seconds exposure time, you can’t go wrong. To reduce image noise, I took about eight shots of each subject and then stacked them in Photoshop. Getting up at 4:30 in the morning to capture the red sky at dawn and the sunrise was definitely the bigger challenge.

The result

My favorite photo from the three days is the one taken right at the mountain inn. It was helped by the fact that the second inn on the right, outside the frame, was having a party that evening, so the outside area was brightly lit. Thus, the picture has a nice, well-lit foreground, but without over-shining the multitude of stars. Thanks to the city lights of Oberstdorf, you can also see the Nebelhorn mountain in the background.