What an outstanding image, great first post Keith. I look forward to seeing more of your work here at NPN This is a classic composition of this location, with the added twist of the Milky Way. I’m coming in late here and there have been a ton of comments and reworks offered. I’ll direct my comments at your most recent rework. I like that you kept the full composition of the original post. I like that you took the rework darker too. IMO, the weakest part of the original post was the softness of the mountain along the right frame edge. It may have been haze, but to my eye it looked like a bad exposure blend. Your rework has got that mountain looking much better (I could see it even slightly darker, but you are mostly there).
While this is a great image overall, I have one suggestion/nitpick. The mountains do not have any halos, but the edges of the mountains look very sharp and crisp against the sky. I might try to slightly feather the sky/land blend to take some of the sharpness away from the horizon. This is a real nitpick, but a great image like this deserves the investment of time to finesse it.
RE: Nitpick - nitpicks are what i’m looking for so this feedback is perfect! I agree the transition is a bit sharp, I’ll fix before printing.
RE: classic composition - funny you should mention that since a couple of days after I took this shot I was looking at some Paul Zizka work and I saw a milky way shot with the exact same rocks in the foreground. Got mad because his was much better
Welcome, Keith. What a spectacular image. Unfortunately, your reworks are not showing up on my computer now. You have excellent feedback here though. Before you send this out for printing, I suggest you make some trial prints on your own to see how it looks on paper. Computer screens fool us, while paper prints are the real thing. I look forward to seeing more of your excellent images.
Take this with a grain of salt, as it has a heavy-dose of personal preference involved, but these look the most natural to my eye when the land is darker. When I am out photographing at night, I find this especially true for distant objects; I can see closer objects better than far objects. Because of that, I like to reduce the luminosity of the land, and slightly more for objects farther away. Here’s a quick and crude edit to illustrate what I mean by that. (I also darkened the lower right rock more, and that little guy on the left, even though they were close, because I thought they dragged the eye away from the better stuff in the center.)
The above aside, exquisite first post and welcome!
