As we’re closing out summer and heading into shorter days and longer nights, it’s an ideal time to practice astrophotography. Night sky photography gives you a great chance to capture beautiful images of the Milky Way and constellations in the night sky. Photographing the night sky is a great way to create great images, hone your skills, and enjoy some peaceful time with nature.
A big misconception about astrophotography is that it requires extensive gear. Not quite. With the right camera, settings and knowledge, most anyone can capture beautiful images of the night sky. So here we’ve compiled the gear, settings, and top tips needed to successfully shoot the summer night sky. sensyne tripod
A camera is the most important piece of gear necessary for shooting in the night sky. While you can shoot the night sky with most DSLR and Mirrorless cameras out there, it’s recommended to shoot with a mid to professional-level, full-frame camera that offers features like great low-light performance and a bright, back touchscreen with pinch-and-zoom features. This will all make focusing on small stars in the dark much easier. Some cameras, such as the Nikon Z9 and Nikon Z6III, have special starlight modes to help with focus when photographing the night sky.
Typically, wide-angle lenses are preferred when photographing the night sky because you can capture even more detail in the sky. However, regardless of the focal length, it’s important that the lens you use has a wide, flat aperture — around f/2.8 or lower is preferred. This gives you much more control, as you can always stop down with most lenses, but you can’t always stop up. The Tamron 17-28mm f/2.8 Di III RXD Lens is a good choice as the Zom range gives Oyu some compositional options.
Another important piece of gear that is essential for nighttime photography is a sturdy tripod with multiple leg extension points and a versatile ball head that can support shooting photos at any angle.
I know what you all are thinking; it’s a lot of extra weight to carry around. However, here’s the honest truth: astrophotography requires you to set your shutter speed to around 30 seconds. It doesn’t matter how good the IBIS is in your camera; if you don’t have a sturdy tripod that allows for maximum control and stability, you won’t take good photos. So be sure to invest in a sturdy tripod before you head out into the field.
For example, the Vanguard ALTA PRO 2+ 264CB 4-Section Carbon Fiber Tripod with BH-100 Ball Head combines light weight and sturdiness. Check out our list of the 5 Best Tripods for Astrophotography & Time-Lapse for the top picks, available right now.
When shooting astro, you need fast and reliable memory cards for two reasons. One, your camera processes more information when shooting astro. If you don’t have a fast memory card that can read and write at blazing speeds, you’re going to be waiting a while for those images to process. Two, astrophotography always happens at night, which means you’re shooting in much colder environments. If you don’t have a reliable, durable memory card that can handle colder temperatures, you could be in for a rude awakening.
Here are my recommendations for memory cards that are incredible fast and reliable in the field:
Another important thing to note about astrophotography, is that it drains your camera’s batteries fast. So pack several if you plan to be out in the field for long.
Now, when it comes to settings, shooting astrophotography can be pretty subjective. Whether it’s personal preference or unique night conditions, settings are hard to set completely in stone ahead of time. But here are the generally accepted settings that will likely set you up for the best success:
It is crucial to understand this. In most cases, your camera’s autofocusing system will not pick up on tiny stars in the sky when it’s pitch black outside. So switch your lens to manual focus and shoot in live mode. Point your camera up to one of the brightest stars in the sky, pinch and zoom in to your screen, and slowly adjust your focus until that star is as sharp as possible. Then, zoom out and start shooting. It’s that easy.
People will say that you need expensive gear like a star tracker to capture sharp images of the night sky, but if you take your time and focus on manual using the live view in your camera, you can capture some pretty spectacular images, without the extra expense.
“The 500 Rule” is incredibly important to remember, when setting your shutter speed at night because that rule can determine the perfect shutter speed to maximize light while eliminating unwanted star trails. So for example, if you are shooting at a 16mm focal length, you would calculate your shutter speed, dividing 500 by 16, which roughly equates to a 30 second shutter speed.
Now, keep in mind, those calculations are for a full-frame camera, and if you were shooting with a crop-sensor camera, you would need to add 1.5x to the focal length for an accurate shutter speed calculation.
It might sound complicated at first, but once you understand and apply this rule to the camera and lenses you typically shoot with, it will drastically improve your astrophotography.
In the settings above, I mentioned shooting between f/2.8 to f/5.6, which is a really safe aperture range to shoot in. Now, many astrophotographers will tell you to shoot at the widest aperture possible, but if you have the ability to stop down a few stops, then you should. A higher aperture like f/4 or f/5.6 could really improve the sharpness of the stars in your frame, as most lenses are their sharpest closest down a sop or two. So, if you can, stop down and find that perfect aperture balance, and your images will come out much sharper.
When it comes to astrophotography, your ISO settings are incredibly important, because ISO determines the quality of your image and reduces the noise and light pollution in your frame. However, as mentioned above, there is a wide ISO range to shoot in. If you shoot at ISO 400, your images will have less noise but less light and detail. If you shoot at ISO 1600, you will have more noise, but more light and detail, which is important when capturing the stars or Milky Way.
So, to have the best of both worlds, try shooting several images of the same frame, at different ISO values, from ISO 400 to beyond. Then, once you have several to choose from and edit, combine and align them as layers in Photoshop, reducing the opacity by 10% for each layer, so you keep the first frame’s clarity, shot at ISO 400, but phase in the increased detail and light, provided by the other frames.
ISO is a tricky setting to work with in astrophotography, but if you shoot to stack, you will create much sharper and detailed images.
While there some photographers that prefer a silhouetted landscape, many want to capture the rich details of a landscape in their astrophotography. However, that’s pretty impossible to do in the middle of the night, when shadows are incredibly harsh. That’s where blue hour comes in.
Blue hour is the time of the day directly before the sun rises or after it sets below the horizon, and gives a beautiful blue cool hue to images. That natural coloration, combined with enough light to pick up background and foreground details, makes blue hour the best time to shoot landscapes you want to include in your nighttime shots.
And with how sophisticated Photoshop has become over the years, there are multiple tools that help you select and mask a detailed, blue hour image, to be the perfect complement for your starry night frames.
Yes, remotes can be helpful, but they’re not necessary for capturing beautiful nighttime shots. Just set your camera’s 10-second self-timer feature, step back and let your camera do the rest of the work. Setting the self-timer will eliminate any chance of shake or vibration from your hands or tripod, and allow for much sharper images without the need for a shutter remote.
Finally, don’t worry about the perfect white balance settings while shooting. Some people like to shoot in Auto white balance, while others prefer shooting at Kelvin white balance, for maximum control. In the end, it doesn’t really matter, because if you shoot in RAW, you can control and manipulate colors and white balance in post. You also might think you prefer a cooler hue, but once you get your image into Lightroom, you realize a warmer white balance looks much better.
So relax and don’t stress about white balance while shooting astro. If you shoot in RAW, and practice the other tips and settings above, you will start creating night sky photography you can be proud of.
Absolutely. A telescope is a necessary piece of astrophotography equipment for deep-sky astrophotography.
Unlike normal night sky photography, which involves capturing stars and constellations with our Milky Way galaxy in the background, deep-sky photography is a specialized branch of astrophotography focused on photographing objects beyond our Solar System, like stars, clusters, nebulae, dust, and other galaxies. To accurately photograph these features, you need a telescope.
A lot of people will tell you that the best way to capture blur-free images when shooting night sky photography is to manually focus to infinity and start photographing. But unfortunately, this is one of those astrophotography tips that isn’t true. A lot of lenses can be slightly off focus, and even a hair-off focus can cause serious blur in your stars.
While it’s good to use infinity as a starting point, there’s a much more precise way to get sharp, in-focus stars. It’s not as hard as you think, and it doesn’t require tons of extra astrophotography equipment either. You just need a camera with good high ISO image quality and a lens that is f/2.8 or faster.
Simply use Live View on your back camera screen and find a star on the screen that is large enough to focus on (a touchscreen is easier for this method). Zoom in on that star on your screen, and slowly begin to focus until that star becomes fully in focus. Once you hit focus, make note of that focus point on your lens, then zoom out and find a second or third star to test and see if the focus is still sharp. If it is, you have focus and you can start capturing amazing images of the night sky without any blur or distortion.
Original post by Nathan Lee Allen 9/15/2020
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