Thank you for all who make it out to our astrophotography meeting and then our trip following it. If you missed the meeting or want to review what we talked about, here is the recap.

The Milky Way and Perseids Meteor Shower at Pinnacles National Park. Photo by Nathaniel Young.

Let’s start off with the gear you will need for astrophotography – more or specifically in this case, to take photos of the milky way. First, you will need a camera with manual controls. Any camera works as long as you can control the exposure and focus manually. To put on your camera, you will want a wide angle lens with a bright aperture. This is not necessarily required because you can do a panorama if you do not have a wide lens. Or you can stack multiple photos together if you do not have a fast enough lens. Since there will not be much light, you will need a tripod to hold your camera steady. Lastly, if you have an intervalometer, it can help you trigger your camera shutter without touching it. If you do not have one, then using the 10 second timer on your camera will work fine. Also, you will need a headlamp with a red light so that you can see and operate your camera in the dark.

Next, here are some important things you will want to do before you take your photo. Turn off image vibration reduction (or stabilization) off. You have your camera on a tripod, so there is no need for this. Shoot in raw format so that you can have more creative freedom to correct and edit your photo in post-processing. Use a wide focal length (lower number on your lens) to capture more of the milky way in your frame. If you do not have a wide enough lens, you can always do a panorama by taking multiple shots while panning the camera between shots; then, you will need to stitch your photos into one photo in software like Photoshop. Also, you want to set your camera in manual focus. Your camera’s autofocus will not work well since it is so dark. If you setup your camera before the sun sets, then you can use autofocus to get the focus; then, you can switch your camera over to manual focus so that your focus point does not change. When manually focusing in the dark, you will want to turn your camera onto live view and zoom into a bright star or have a friend stand a good distance away with a light. Lastly, you will want to set your camera into manual mode so that you can control your aperture, shutter speed, and ISO all manually.

As for exposure, the goal is to maximize the amount of light that reaches your camera without too much noise. In order to let in the most light to our camera, we will choose a wide aperture like f/2.8. Secondly, we will want to choose a long exposure; however, we want to also minimize star trails so that the stars appear nice and sharp. Since the Earth is slowing rotating, the stars relative to our position appear to move across the sky. So if we have too long of a shutter speed, then we will introduce star trails. While nice long star trails look cool, short ones look like the stars are just blurred a little bit. Picking your shutter speed depends a lot of how zoomed in (or zoomed out) your focal length is. The longer your focal length is on your lens, then the shorter the shutter speed you want to pick in order to minimize the star trails. A good starting point is 20 seconds for the exposure time. There is something called the 500 rule where you take the number 500 and divide it by your focal length times your crop factor. However, due to high resolution cameras, this may still result in star trails. You can always use the PhotoPills spot stars calculator by just entering in your camera and lens and aperture. The calculator will tell you the recommended shutter speed as well as the classic 500 rule. Lastly, we want to choose a high ISO in order to gain the correct exposure. ISO 3200 is a good starting point. These settings are just a starting point, but you will need to adjust the exposure based on your camera, lens, and lighting conditions.

So where and when can you take a photo of the milky way? Well to start, you will need to be in a location without too much light pollution on a night without much moon light. If you can, finding a location with an interesting foreground can make your milky way photo exponentially more interesting to look at. Also, the milky way core is only visible from about mid-March to mid-October with the best times in the mid-summer. During the other times of the year, the milky way core is only above the horizon during the daytime. My favorite application for planning milky way photos is PhotoPills (Google Play or Apple App Store). Their planner allows you to see the direction and time that the milky way will rise and set based on your location (or any location you select on the map). In addition, you can see the times the sun and moon rise and set or the phase of the moon which are all important things to know when planning your trip. Lastly, it has an augmented reality mode where you can see an overlay of the milky way on your phone camera view with can help you plan where to set up your camera once on location. Another mobile application that I use is called SkyView (Google Play or Apple App Store). It is another augmented reality application where you can learn more about the stars, planets, and constellations while you are out taking photos. Or while you are waiting for your timelapse. Lastly, the mobile app called SkySafari (Google Play or Apple App Store) is great for seeing where the stars and planters are in the sky based on an exact date, time, and location. This can be useful if you want to know what you took a picture of while you are editing a photo that you took a few weeks ago.

Here are a few other techniques that you might want to try out too once you got the basics down. Stacking is a process of taking multiple consecutive photos and then averaging them together to reduce the noise. Panoramas can help you create higher resolution photos with a wider field of view. Exposure blending can be used to blend multiple photos together taken at different times. For example, you can take a photo of the foreground during blue hour so that you can retain more detail in the foreground while using a lower ISO. Then, when it gets fully dark, you can blend in the exposure for the sky. Tracking is mounting your camera to a head that moves at the same rate to as the earth is rotating in respect to the stars. This allows you to take a longer exposure without having star trails; thus, also allows you to achieve more detailed photos. Light painting can be used to illuminate a dark foreground subject. Lastly, a timelapse is a way to combine multiple consecutive photos together to create a video of the milky way moving across the sky.

As for editing your milky way photos, my favorites to use are Adobe Lightroom Classic CC and Adobe Photoshop CC. Lightroom can be used to correct your exposure and white balance, add contrast adjustments, adjust the color intensity or HSL sliders, vignette removal, and lens profile corrections. Typically, most people prefer to have a cooler white balance temperature. In addition, if you happen to see a weird circular noise pattern, then you will want to turn off the lens profile corrections; then, you will have to manually adjust the vignette removal. Also, if you happen to have some blue halos around your stars, then go to the manual tab in the lens corrections. Then adjust the hue and color defringe amount to your liking. Also, Photoshop can be a powerful tool for astrophotography. This includes blending, stacking, orton effect, luminosity masking, selective noise reduction, dodge/burning, spot removal, etc. I like to point out luminosity masking which allows you to select certain luminance values (brightness values) in an image. Then, you can use this for things including to selectively reduce noise for only the darkest areas, add some midtone contrast curves, or selectively dodge/burn.

Lastly, I like to talk about the photo I (Nathaniel Young) took at the top of the article. It was taken in Pinnacles National Park on a night of a new moon during the peak of the Perseids Meteor Shower. This date and location where planned by using the PhotoPills app and looking at Google Maps. The settings are at 16mm at f/2.8, 15 seconds, and ISO 3200. I had my camera setup before sunset, so I was able to blend in a foreground from blue hour. In addition, I stacked three photos using Photoshop’s smart objects and mean stack mode for the sky to reduce a little noise. The base exposure and color adjustments were done in Lightroom. In Photoshop, I blended and stacked the photos in addition to adding some midtone contrast to taste.

Here are some additional links to help you with your astrophotography:

Dark Site Finder. Great to find locations without much light pollution.
Lonely Speck. Best website to learn about astrophotography. Here is their astrophotography 101 guide.
Stellarium. Website to visualize the milky way, stars, planets, and constellations at specific date, time, and location.

So after our meeting, we all gathered our stuff and headed 25 minutes west of campus to a dark sky area. Here are a number of photos that you have shared with us so far. Please continue to share your photos by tagging us or using the hashtag on Instagram or posting it in our Facebook Group.

The photos below are taken by (respectively from left to right, top to bottom): Austin Lu, Wenjun Ning, Wenjun Ning, Devansh Rathi, Noah Lee, Joshua Ruan, Noah Lee, and Devansh Rathi.