This photo was taken at the Pinnacles Desert in Western Australia, the moon had just set below the horizon and the core of the Milky Way was rising towards the east and was at about 40 degrees. This obviously isn’t a perfect representation but it’s pretty close. You won’t see any color as our eyes can’t determine color very well in low light.

The photo you see on the left is directly out of the camera, no post processing has been done at all and you can see quite a bit of green towards the horizon and some orange and magenta hues in the core. My camera’s white balance was set to auto and this is a 30 second exposure. ISO was set at 3200 and aperture was f2.8.

edit Ok it seems some people are able to distinguish color in the Milky Way and some aren’t. Though it’s more common to not see any color. I did quite a bit of research and almost every time this question was posed, people had varying views on what they could and couldn’t see. No color – some color – lots of color. So I came to the conclusion that there are just too many variables to accurately depict what you can see, you can only approximate what the average person can see. Yes, some will see it more vividly, some will see it less vividly but the average person will see it similarly to what I showed in my photo. Oh and of course the location plays a large factor………not everybody is able to sail 100 miles off shore to get the absolute best view possible so it’s a bit pointless to use that as the standard bearer 🙂 One other factor you should bear in mind is the technology we choose to portray these images on. Computer monitors. Again there are way too many variables at play here, especially when it comes to contrast and brightness. What I see on my computer monitor is most likely to be different to what another person sees.