Star Photography

I just tried it again but the sky is not good today

the term you are looking for is called - astro photography

btw those amazing pictures youve seen, i bet most of them were made with a tracking mount; your 18mm will make good milkyway pics, while your 300mm will catch jupiters moons, to give you an idea

here a quick n dirty view into our galaxy, far away from a good astro pic, not stacked, no blackframe .. at least the sensor was cool lol

if your looking at most things, your seeing nasa and the hubble scope - you'll never get your hands on it. otherwise you have to invest in a good scope, and something that tracks the stars so they don't blur as you shoot.

you also need VERY clear skies. where i am, i don't see the milky way, the sky is a moderate gray at night. even though i got a scope at a garage sale, i doubt it will be of much use for me. to get good shots that sky has to be very dark. no city lights. out in the countries. away from power. i remember when we had no power for the entire county, and the city had no problem lighting our sky. and that was miles away.

---Mike Savad

For getting a starry milky way sky the wider the lens the better. Essentially you'll be able to keep your shutter open longer before the stars look like star trails.

Check out this site to find the darkest skies: http://darksitefinder.com/maps/unitedstates-15color.html

You can use something like Stellarium to track the moon/planets etc. Generally though you want to go to somewhere that isn't completely full of light pollution. Also, it's good to go out when there isn't a big bright moon in the sky. And it goes without saying but the clearer the skies the better.

A lot depends on what type of star photography you want to take. Star trails are very easy to take, and can be shot with just about any camera that has fully-manual settings. They're a great place to start and learn more about what works well and what doesn't.

This one wasn't actually intended to be a star trail shot! To get the best quality for larger prints, it's often best to take a long exposure (low ISO, less noisy) of the ground, and blend it in with a short exposure (high ISO, more noisy) of the stars. This shot, taken at ISO 400, f/2.8, 17mm, with a 30 minute exposure, was taken with that intention, but when I saw it on the screen I knew I had to keep it as a star trail photo:



This shot, on the other hand, was intended to be a star trail photo. Here the bright moon lights up the foreground nicely, especially the white paint on the pier, making it look almost like daylight. For this photo, I used a technique known as stacking, where instead of taking one super-long exposure, you take a sequence of much shorter exposures, and then combine them in post-processing using dedicated stacking software, or Photoshop. This has several benefits, two key ones being that it reduces noise, and also prevents overexposure of the foreground.

This photo is made up from 191 stacked images, each taken at ISO 2500, f/3.5, 16mm, for 30 seconds. Here, I made sure the composition included Polaris, which is almost exactly lined up with the celestial pole, and therefore stays stationary, with all the other stars revolving around it. For a little extra fun, I varied the opacity of the stacked shots, creating a comet-like effect where the trails fade out, and then added some starbursts. Not to everyone's taste, but it shows the possibilities.



Capturing the stars frozen, as the eye sees them, is much trickier, and pushes even the best cameras to their absolute limits. It's something that most recent DSLRs can do, but you may struggle to produce high-quality images suitable for large prints if you have a crop-frame camera, and especially if it's a couple of generations old. A fast, wide-angle lens is also very beneficial, and you also need a lot of post-processing to bring out detail while controlling noise.

All my shots here have been taken on a full-frame camera, so if you have a crop-frame camera, you will need a 10mm lens to equal my 16mm lens. The Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 lens is one of the best choices for star photography on a crop-frame camera. Samyang have also recently released a 10mm f/2.8 prime which is good on paper, but I've not had any direct experience with. (It's manual focus only, but you pretty much need to use manual focus for night sky work anyway).

Wide angle lenses are key because they increase the exposure time you can use before the stars start to blur, due to the rotation of the earth. For full-frame lenses, the old rule of thumb used to be that you shouldn't exceed an exposure time of 600/focal length, so with a 16mm lens, that would be 600/16=37.5 seconds. If you have a crop-frame camera, you'll need to convert the focal length first, so for example, an 18mm crop-frame lens is equivalent to a 18*1.5=27mm full-frame lens, so you shouldn't exceed 600/27=22 seconds. You can see why wide angle lenses really help a lot.

I say the old rule, because with the resolution of modern cameras, even this rule starts to show trails quite often. The 'rule of 500' and 'rule of 400' gives better results, but on a crop-frame camera can be challenging.

This could be argued to be a slightly clichéd composition, but is a relatively simple shot. Photographed at ISO 3200, f/2.8, 16mm, for 20 seconds, and with a bit of processing, this came out quite nicely. The tent here is lit by my smartphone running an app that allows you to set the colour and brightness of the screen -- this is much more predictable and controllable than a candle. Again, in this case I actually took a second shot of the ground using a lower ISO and longer exposure, and blended the two together, but the only result was to make the ground less noisy, allowing for a larger print -- the overall result and feel of the image is unchanged.



This is another fairly simple shot, and includes a fair bit of luck -- I was able to predict the train coming round the corner, and capture it in this photo. Luckily the lens flare lined up perfectly with the Milky Way! This is a single exposure, at ISO 3200, f/2.8, 16mm, for 30 seconds.



Sometimes I like to include a really wide field of view, so I'll stitch multiple images together. This is particularly tricky with stars, as the sky appears to move between shots, whereas the ground doesn't, which generally results in automatic stitching being unusable, and requiring plenty of manual work. This definitely isn't something to try straight away, but can give interesting results. This shot was made up from 37 different photos, 6 covering the ground and 31 covering the sky. The sky photos were taken at f/2.8, ISO 3200, for 30 seconds, whereas the ground photos were taken at f/2.8, ISO 1600 for 2 minutes. I took the opportunity to sneak myself into the shot in the bottom-right corner:



And here's another panoramic shot, this time a simpler 2x2 panoramic image (4 shots in total). Here I used a very high ISO of 5000, at 16mm, f/2.8, 30 seconds.



Location-wise, I like to get foreground interest into my photos rather than just pointing at the sky, so the key elements are an interesting foreground and a dark sky location. Living where I do, there aren't many dark sky locations particularly close, but that's all part of the challenge (The Lower Mainland area of BC, Canada, which I live in the middle of, has a population of 2.5 million). Whenever I'm out away from the city, I'll always keep an eye out for possible compositions that might work at night. Even so, you'll notice a lot of my shots have some light pollution present, although I always try and work this to be complementary to the final photo.

For star trails, some moon can be beneficial in lighting up the foreground, but to capture the Milky Way it's almost always a bad thing -- any moon will wash out the sky and make things difficult in all but the most superb atmospheric conditions. There's also little point shooting before astronomical dusk or after astronomical dawn (when the sun is less than 18 degrees below the horizon), as although it looks dark to the eye, it's not dark enough for the camera. Most sunrise/sunset apps will show astronomical dusk and dawn times.

Atmospheric conditions are also key -- even when there are no clouds, sometimes you'll see nothing at all, sometimes the Milky Way will sparkle above you. It depends on humidity, temperature, air currents, and various other factors. In the US and Canada, the cleardarksky site gives a reasonable forecast of these, but I don't know any sites covering Europe.

Finally, I also rely heavily on apps like Stellarium, which simulate the night sky. These allow you to set your location and alter the time, so you can very quickly see where and when the Milky Way will rise for any given night. This allows you to work out which locations might work, whether the moon will be up or not when you need to go shooting, etc.

Bear in mind that, apart from the first shot, most of these required significant post-processing work -- if you're hoping to get shots like this straight off the camera, it's simply not going to happen, regardless of what camera and lens you have.

Hopefully that gives some initial tips, let me know if you have any questions :)

Posting to follow this.

LOVE that tent image Alexis

Thanks JC! :)

http://www.astropix.com/HTML/I_ASTROP/TOC_AP.HTM

^^ pure gold

You need some dark skies - it's hard to find now, especially in the eastern US. You also need an interesting foreground



Sometimes, the moon will light up the landscape for you, others you'll have to paint it with a flashlight. Sometimes, you just get lucky




Star trails are fun to process, but I find that only photographers like them:


Don't let anyone tell you that you need moonless skies to get great star shots. A full moon will wash out the stars, but when the moon is only around 30%ish, it'll light the landscape up so you get more than silhouettes and stars. My favorite kind of night! You need a wide angle lens, and a camera capable of handling high ISOs. Just have fun!