There are experiences you plan for months, and still arrive unprepared.

Not in the practical sense. The gear is ready, the route is mapped, the camera setups and schedule are memorized. You've thought about almost everything that could go wrong, and found some kind of answer for most of it.

What you can't really prepare for is what it feels like to be there. The weight of the solitude when the helicopter leaves. The cold that settles into your hands before the night has even started. The moment when the wind picks up and every plan you made rearranges itself into something simpler: stay warm, stay safe, keep going.

I've been sitting with this newsletter for a while, not because the story is hard to tell, but because I wanted to give it the space it deserved. What happened this past March on a summit above 4,000 meters was one of the most demanding, disorienting, and ultimately profound things I have done as a photographer. And I realized I couldn't just share the image without sharing what it actually took to make it.

So this is that story. From the months of planning, to the sleepless nights at altitude, to forty hours in front of a screen that showed me nothing for the first ten, to the morning the sun finally hit my face.

I hope it accompanies you well.

Once a year, in the northern hemisphere, something quietly extraordinary happens in the night sky. For a brief window of a few days each March, it becomes possible to witness both arms of the Milky Way above the horizon on the same night, not simultaneously, but within the same rotation of the Earth. The winter arch, a quieter, less dense band of stars, rises in the first half of the night. Then, as the Earth turns, the summer arch climbs from the other direction, carrying with it the galactic core, that unmistakable dense river of light. Together, they form what is called the double Milky Way arch.

To photograph this phenomenon requires a precise alignment of several things at once: the new moon phase, the angle of both arches relative to your location, the weather, a clear and unobstructed 360-degree horizon, and ideally, the least light pollution possible. The window is around five days. In some years, weather alone erases it entirely.

Last year, I captured this from the Gornergrat, at just over 3,000 meters in the Swiss Alps. That image became one of the most technically significant things I had ever made. This year, I wanted to go further.

My search for dark skies has been quietly intensifying over the years, in a way I did not fully notice until recently.

It accelerated after Peru. Spending time in the Peruvian Andes, under some of the darkest skies on Earth, changed something in how I see the night. The sky there is not just darker, it is heavier, more present, almost physical. You look up and feel the weight of what you are seeing. Since coming back, I have never stopped chasing that feeling.

Living in the Alps means I have access to mountains, and mountains mean altitude, and altitude means, in theory, darker skies, less atmosphere between you and the stars. So I have been going higher, year after year. This time, the goal was to reach 4,000 meters and see whether the sky would give me more. Whether I could see and capture something that has rarely, if ever, been photographed from that elevation and from that angle.

The place I had in mind was the Dent d'Hérens, a summit just under 4,200 meters, sitting directly behind the Matterhorn in between the Italian and Swiss border. It offers a view of the Matterhorn that almost no one ever sees, because the only people who visit it are climbers, and even for them it is a serious undertaking. Photographers do not go there, certainly not in winter, certainly not at night. The gear required for astrophotography and the gear required for alpine climbing are simply incompatible in most situations.

None of this would have been remotely possible without my mountain guide, Richard Lehner. He is the person I trust entirely in the mountains, someone who has guided in this region for years and who understands both the terrain and what it demands. When I described the project to him last September, he did not dismiss it. We began thinking through the logistics together.

The original plan involved a collaboration with a ski resort on the Italian side, which fell through for reasons I will not go into in detail. But that failure did not close the door. Richard and I kept the core idea alive and adapted.

As the March window approached, we identified the specific summit, confirmed the approach with AirZermatt, and began coordinating the logistics. Then, almost immediately, things became complicated.

The week of the window was one of the windiest weeks Switzerland had seen in recent months. An incident at Engelberg, where a cable car was damaged by the force of the wind, made the news. At 4,000 meters and above, exposed terrain and those wind speeds would have been genuinely dangerous, and Richi made the call, correctly, to push our departure date.

Then I discovered that the 19th of March is a bank holiday in Catholic cantons in Switzerland, and that AirZermatt is not authorized to fly for non-emergency operations on that day. Our window was already being compressed, and now one of the only viable nights was blocked.

Richard solved it with a call to a pilot on the Italian side. Since the Dent d'Hérens sits on the border, an Italian helicopter crew was authorized to operate there. The logistics became more complex: AirZermatt would fly us to the border, where we would transfer to the Italian team to be dropped at the summit, and reverse the process in the morning. More steps, more variables, but it worked.

I want to be honest about what that week felt like. I had come to the Gornergrat two days early to acclimatize, which turned out to be three nights in total. The altitude helps with acclimatization, but it does not help with sleep, and neither does sustained anxiety. My nights were restless and full of the kind of low-level dread that comes when you genuinely do not know whether something will happen or not. The anticipation alone was exhausting in a way I had not expected.

I also used those nights to practice, testing my layers, my star tracker, making sure I could operate everything with gloved hands in the cold. And it was during one of those practice sessions that my camera shot an entire hour and a half sequence and recorded nothing. The images existed on the display but not on the card. Apparently this is a known issue with mirrorless cameras in extreme cold, but I had never experienced it before. If it had already failed at 3,100 meters, I had to find a solution before going higher. Turns out that switching the camera off and on again helps, but it also means checking your images regularly to make sure you’re not missing any shots.

The gear for such environments is by far the most important factor in the planning. Richi and I have had the conversation about the eventuality that we could be stuck at the summit if for some reasons the helicopters could not come and pick us up.

Knowing we might be stranded on the summit overnight if the helicopter could not return, every piece of equipment had to account for that possibility. Over the past months, I had been building a kit closer to what a high-altitude expedition would use than what a landscape photographer normally carries.

My sleeping bag is rated comfortably to minus 30 degrees Celsius, with a survival threshold extending to minus 50 or minus 60. My boots are three-layer mountaineering boots with crampons attachable. My clothing system was layered for both passive warmth and active movement. We also had a rope and harness system prepared because once on the summit, I had to be connected at all times when outside the tent, because the cornices surrounding the area made any unroped movement genuinely dangerous.

None of this was theater. It was the minimum required to make that night survivable.

On Thursday evening, we flew.

I am not someone who is afraid of helicopters, but seeing the Dent d'Hérens up close for the first time was a different kind of moment. The moment the helicopter left and the sound faded, something settled in. There was no going back until morning at best.

The forecasted temperatures were around minus 18 to minus 19 degrees Celsius. That is manageable at altitude with the right gear. What we had not really expected was the wind increasing through the night, reaching a point after around 11 p.m. where it became difficult to operate, reaching probably minus 25 to minus 28 degrees Celsius.

I have some residual sensitivity to strong mountain wind from an incident in 2021 at the foot of the Matterhorn, where I experienced gusts above 160 kilometers per hour. The sound of a tent in that kind of wind is not easy to forget. That night on the Dent d'Hérens, as the gusts built, I had to make peace with the fact that there was nothing I could do except continue, and trust the rope, and trust Richard.

We were three on that summit: Richard, his son Arnaud, and myself. I want to say clearly that I would not have done this without Richard, and having Arnaud there made the entire experience richer. There is something about sharing an environment like that with people who know it, who love it, that changes the quality of the night.

The night was going to be restless and while Richard and Arnaud were taking care of the camp and the safety, I had a very strict schedule to follow to make sure I would get everything. Here is a snippet:

I photographed the winter arch first, before the wind made the full experience more demanding. The summer arch followed. And then, unexpectedly, as the light pollution from the Italian side, the direction of Milan, faded slightly in the early morning, something else appeared that I had not anticipated.

One of the harder things about that night was confronting, again, how much light pollution has grown. Even at 4,200 meters, the glow from the Italian plain was clearly visible and had increased compared to the previous year. I say this not to be discouraging, but because I see it now systematically in my work, and it matters.

But there was also a gift. While reviewing the winter arch panorama, I noticed a faint oval arch extending in the direction opposite to the sun, crossing the frame in a subtle but unmistakable gradient. This is called the Gegenschein, or counterglow, which is a diffuse brightening of the night sky caused by sunlight backscattering off interplanetary dust, directly opposite the sun's position. It is extremely faint and rarely captured in photography. It was there, visible even in the unprocessed files, which told me immediately that the final image would contain more than I had planned for.

What I set out to make as a double arch became a triple arch: the Gegenschein, the winter Milky Way, and the summer Milky Way, all in a single frame of sky above the Alps.

I came home and recovered for a long time. Then I began the edit the week that followed.

Forty hours. That is how long the processing took, and it is by far the most I have ever spent on a single image.

This time I worked entirely with FITS files, a format used in scientific astronomy that stores raw light data with a much higher bit depth and dynamic range than standard RAW files opened directly in Photoshop. While Photoshop works in 16-bit, FITS files preserve the full precision of your sensor data, which means more information survives the stacking process. To get there, I stacked each panorama panel in PixInsight, a professional astronomical imaging software, then stitched the FITS panoramas in AstroPixel Processor, the only software that can currently mosaic FITS frames, before returning to PixInsight for calibration and final sky processing.

The difficulty, and I want to be honest about this, is that for the first ten hours, there was nothing to look at. No visible image. Just numbers, histograms, calibration scripts, lines of code. For someone who is accustomed to seeing what they are working on, this was genuinely disorienting.

I admit I wanted to throw my computer out the window multiple times.

The final image is composed of two tracked and stacked panoramas of 17 and 16 panels respectively, each panel a stack of four 40-second exposures, supplemented with H-alpha data for emission nebula detail, plus 32 landscape frames shot at nautical twilight. The total working folder for this image is approximately 300 GB.

What you are looking at is the Matterhorn, seen from the Dent d'Hérens at 4,200 meters, from a vantage point that has not really been photographed. Above it, from left to right: the summer arch, dense and unmistakable, carrying the galactic core; the Gegenschein, a faint luminous oval crossing the frame; and the winter arm of the Milky Way, rising pale and wide.

I see this image as a summit of its own kind, for what it represents in terms of preparation, risk, patience, and the help of people who made it possible. I am deeply grateful to Richard and Arnaud Lehner, to the AirZermatt and Italian teams, and to BegiBakar (Mikel), who taught me the processing workflow that made this image what it is. And a shoutout to my loved ones who were all doubting the safety of my pursuit, wondering why I had to go there specifically to get a shot, and had to bear the stress of not knowing if I would make it back as planned.

I am also aware that light pollution makes each year slightly harder to replicate. What was captured here may not be repeatable, not from this location, not at this quality, not in the same conditions. That alone makes it feel like something worth protecting.

This letter barely scratches the surface of everything that happened during that week, the logistics, the choices made in real time, the editing decisions, the things that nearly went wrong. If there is anything you would like me to go deeper on, whether technical, personal, or logistical, I am collecting questions and plan to write a follow-up letter that answers them directly.

Send me an email to [email protected], or reach out through my website www.angelfux.com. Happy to take the time to answer all of your inquiries.

Thank you for being here, and for following work that demands this much to make.

Angel