So I decided to dig out the Star Adventurer and the Samyang 135mm as a lighweight portable solution for my holidays in a true Bortle 2 location, a village halfway to the top of Mt Chelmos in the Northern Peloponnese. The sky is so pristine there is actually a professional observatory at the mountain top. I would get only two nights there and it had been three years since I last used that stuff, so I wanted to practice a little bit at home to make sure I'll make the most out of the holidays. The result from the first trial night was so impressive I ended up doing a proper session and it soon became obvious that I didn't really need the dark sky. If you've imaged isolated faint targets with f/5 or f/6 telescopes, getting incredible ultra wide field results with a fast lens is a walk in the park. I did 5 sessions in total, each with 80-150 subs.

All subs were 20 seconds long, ISO800, unguided (obviously), with the lens stopped down to f/2.8. I used in-camera dark frame subtraction (for lights and flats) and the D7500's intervalometer. Basically that gave me one 20 second light for every 47 seconds of imaging time. Every 40 subs or so (i.e. every half hour) I would go to the balcony, pause the camera and reorient the FOV a bit to "dither". 

I integrated with APP (all automatic and defaults except I manually excluded some subs), postprocessed with StarTools (standard zig-zag workflow except I binned earlier to make things faster) and did some finishing touches with Darktable.

I spent my two nights in Mt Chelmos drinking, eating and laughing with friends and family. I had taken the gear with me but never unloaded it from the car. I did enjoy the sky visually, by which I mean we were all marveling at the dark nebulae you could see with the naked eye. I don't think I would have been able to locate Deneb anyway, there were so many stars and nebulae it was impossible to discern constellations on the milky way band.