>>2994672>>2994682Here's a photo that demonstrates why you can't do this in one exposure, or get by with minimum editing. This is a photo I took on a trip a while back. It was late, I'd been driving for twelve hours that day, and I stepped out behind the cabins I was staying at and took some quick snapshits, without bothering to do any real setup beforehand or fancy post-processing after.
It's a 20-second exposure at 14mm, which is about as long as you can go without doing the track-n-stack rigamarole. Note the difference between the sky and the foreground, and within the foreground. The sky is washed out, even in a national park with minimal light pollution. It's just dim, is all. The way you make it pop like in your photo is to collect more light to give you enough to generate more saturation and contrast, and support for boosting them further in post. You can also see the heavy vignetting my cheap Samyang 14/2.8 produces when shot wide open.
In the foreground, the window in the cabin is a bit blown out, as is the area to its left (someone turned their headlights on) But the picnic table in the front is far underexposed. The exposure's already been pushed a bit, it's still dim and very muddy. What I would have needed is essentially an HDR photo of the foreground. You do HDR, of course, by exposing for the various parts in turn and combining them. Now none of those would have gotten me anything in the sky, since exposing to stop the window from blowing out would leave the sky very dim due to the short exposure, and exposing for the picnic table would have required at least a minute, which would mean trailing.
The result isn't all that impressive. Its the multiple exposures and heavy editing that make it impressive, and I didn't do that in this photo. You can make impressive landscape astro, but you have to be willing to go through the rigamarole.
