Milky way

Composite of two photos. Zagreb in the fog and the Milky Way from Hvar. It was shot with a camera and the same lens to give a credible representation of how to see the Milky Way if there was no light pollution in the city.

View of the Milky Way with a wide-angle lens. On the left side of the photo, you can see a meteor that entered the atmosphere and started burning. A group of astronomers are preparing for a night sky imaging.

You can record the Milky Way in two ways. Without tracking and with tracking.
Without a tracking you need a photo camera, tripod and a trigger. Unfortunately without a tracking you will soon have a shift (a star trail) across your field due to Earths rotation. If you don't want to have trails in your final image your exposure time with this method will be very short. You will also have to boost up your gain (ISO) to get more of the light from the stars and Milky Way but it will produce more noise in your photo also with time limited exposure.
With tracking, in addition to the above, you also need a mechanism that will track the apparent movement of the object across the sky. It can be a handmade barndoor, small portable trackers or telescope mounts. With tracking you can do very long exposures. The advantage of this is that you can use a lower sensitivity of the sensor and have much less noise than in the first case. You can also expose much longer to get as much signal or light as possible for the final photo.