To help educate Reddit user Nagemasu, who doesn’t fully understand night photography and calls all my photos fake, here are screenshots of the completely unedited RAW photos straight out of my camera with the EXIF showing the settings, time, and date of my photos. Many skilled night photographers use a tracker device to take longer exposures of the sky (for more detail, dynamic range, and less noise). Tracking compensates for the Earth’s rotation to take long exposures of faint details in the night sky, but makes the Earth appear blurry, so I combine the tracked sky image with a separate still image of the Earth usually taken at night, twilight, or during soft light hours of the day.

As you can see in the EXIF data the photos were taken at the same location hours apart, at different focal lengths, and different settings. The 3rd photo is the final image where I masked the two photos together and made adjustments on the tons, color balance, and colors to match the two images. Light pollution from Portland created the orange glow and clouds on the sky image (which Nagemasu believes was fake).