Caption: "360° panorama of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley at night. The Milky Way is visible as the arc in the center. A sailing stone is also seen below along with the tracks of other sailing stones." (Slightly edited.)

Because this is a 360° panorama, the Milky Way looks like a top view a ring or an arch. The image has made the horizon crossings look very close together relative to the maximum altitude above the horizon.

You NEVER see Milky Way like this from the Earth with ordinary human perception. The Milky Way really follows a great circle on the celestial sphere, and so the horizon plane cuts it in half and the 2 points on the horizon are 180° apart and the Earth blocks the lower half from our view.

Yours truly thinks this image has to have been taken with a high sensitivity camera to make the Milky Way look so bright.

Click the image for Wikipedia page image and click on that for the high resolution image.

The sailing stones have now been explained (see Wikipedia: Sailing stones: Explanation; Alexandra Witze, "Mystery of Death Valley's "Wandering Stones" Explained [Video]", SciAm, 2014aug27).

Credit/Permission: Dan Durisco for US National Park Service, 2005 / Public domain.
Image link: Wikipedia: File:Deathvalleysky nps big.jpg.
Local file: local link: milky_way_death_valley.html.
File: Galaxies file: milky_way_death_valley.html.