The Milky Way's Dark Lane, Rising Over Chile's Atacama Desert
The stairway in the photograph is in Chile, and by its own caption it brings you only a little bit closer to heaven. The sky is doing the rest of the work. Rising behind the expansive Atacama Desert is the dark lane of our own Milky Way. To the upper left there is a band of zodiacal light, with the star Spica sitting inside the stripe. Just above the horizon, green and red airglow. Four named phenomena in one frame, and none of them the thing the picture is ostensibly of.
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The foreground is the Desert Staircase sculpture, and the image was timed so that the peering perch sits just in front of the near-vertical Milky Way band — which is to say the composition was arranged around the sky, not the stairway.
There is also a scale marker along the bottom edge: on the horizon, left to right, some Andes Mountains, the Licancabur volcano, and the town lights of San Pedro de Atacama.