Milky Way above Greens Point lighthouse, Letete, New Brunswick, Canada

I've been trying for ages to get a shot of the Milky Way as the background to a lighthouse, but was never very successful. However, this one turned out OK. It's a composite, made up of two photos - the Milky Way, taken in a dark sky park in St. Stephen, New Brunswick at 11 pm. I took the lighthouse and foreground at Greens Point, Letete, New Brunswick, just after sunset the previous evening, when the light was good, and the decorative ring of lights around the lighthouse wasn't lit up like a Christmas tree, drowning out all the stars, including the Milky Way! I think this attempt turned out quite nicely!

This is a two-photo composite. For both shots I used a Canon EOS 80D with an 18-55mm lens.

For the foreground and lighthouse, my settings were:

f5.6, 1/13 second, ISO 400 at 22mm

For the sky:

f3.5, 15 seconds, ISO 5000 at 18mm

I took the foreground and lighthouse photo at dusk, around 9.25pm, when there was still some light in the sky, and underexposed it in Lightroom.

I took the Milky Way shot the following night, under a perfectly clear sky, in Ganong Nature Park in St. Stephen. In Lightroom, I brightened the whites and blacks and dehazed and denoised, set the White Balance to 5300K and removed some aircraft trails.

In Photopea (free version of Photoshop), I merged the sky into the background of the foreground shot, saved it, and then inverted it, to create the reflection in the water and the tide pool where the lighthouse is reflected.