Do you think I'm wasting my time at F4?, a buddy of mine could lend me his 35-70 F2.8.
interestingly I have a QTVR head so could attempt a stitch just like Wally's.
In general, fully open photographic lenses are not too good for astrophotography. Both the 300/2.8 and the 85/1.2 I own - otherwise outstanding lenses - clearly show their limits compared to my dedicated 550/2.7 FFC. He mentions using a 24mm lens at 2.5 - my best guess is that he used a 24mm 1.4 stopped down. If you stop your lens down, it will become a bit slow imho. Also, as the original photographer explained, he had to stitch several pictures, you'll need a relatively flat field to stitch without cheating too much or risk having distorted stars at the seams. I do not own the 24/105 lens, but I suspect it suffers from some barrel distortion at 24mm... this will be quite annoying. Try a few things on your night sky before going there.
This being said, don't let anything I say stop you. If I was there, I would definitely attempt to replicate/imitate that shot, with a point and shoot if I only had that.
PS: one more thing I forgot to say - if you are shooting for the screen or web and stitching four/five shots, you'll have more than enough pixels to downsize the image and hide eventual star trails/defects., as long as you aren't pixel peeping.