This is my first successful attempt at astrophotography. It is tracked single exposure of the Milky Way. I made this image out at Fishtrap, Washington on a moonless sky. This is a 90 second exposure made with a polar aligned equatorial tracking mount shot a f/5.6 with a 15mm Fisheye Lens at ISO3200.
Astrophotography is a very involved discipline in which I’m just starting to get my feet wet. Tips and techniques will vary depending on your equipment and experience level. If you are on a budget you can capture Milky Way with just a tripod, a DSLR or Mirrorless Camera and a fast Wide Angle Lens.
The first thing you want to consider is your location on the planet. If you are near cities you will battle light pollution in your Milky Way scenes. The above image shows some of this as the yellow haze on the horizon. I believe some of this is also a thin layer of smoke from wild fires burning hundreds of miles away up in BC. You can find online light pollution maps and look for rural areas where light pollution is minimal. In my area we have a local Astronomical Club who regularly star gazes at a spot nearby and that is where I went for this image.
You will also want to consider time of year. While it’s around all year there is a “Milky Way Season” generally accepted to be from around April to October. You will also want to consider the phase of the moon. If you try to shoot Milky Way on a full moon, the light from the Moon will drown out your Milky Way. Best practice is to shoot before during or after New Moon when little to no sunlight is reflecting off the moon. There are plenty of apps that can aid in your astrophotography journey. The one I use the most is Luna Solaria, and app that tracks current moon phases and plots future moon phases and gives useful information as the the brightness of the moon. Remember that you want as little light reflecting of the moon as possible. Another app that I’m beginning to explore is the PhotoPills App which is reviewed as a useful tool including hyperfocal distance charts and articles to help you on your Astrophotography journey.
Gear…..
You will want to use a camera that will allow you to achieve ISOs around 1600 and above. ISO is like a gain knob on a guitar amp. It allows you to turn the sensitivity of the sensor up but it will also introduce noise. De-noise algorithms have gotten very good at mitigating this, allowing you to take one image and clean up any sensor noise added in from higher ISO. Most astrophotographers imaging deep sky objects will take hundreds of images of one object and use stacking software to clean up noise. I’ve had success with Milky Way, making one or two images and using the new De-noise AI on Lightroom Classic.
Longer focal length lens might be able to focus on a smaller portion of the night sky and bring far away objects closer but the exposure times needed to gather light from distant stars leads to streaks of the light rather than pinpoint deep sky objects.
A wide angle lens will give you more latitude to shoot longer exposures while hiding star trails and egg shaped stars. This is why I recommend starting out with Milky Way Photography. While imperceptible to the naked eye; because of the rotation of the earth, a long shutter speed will capture this rotational movement and “drag” the star light across the camera’s sensor. I wide angle lens will mask this a bit. You can get a feel for what shutter speeds are appropriate in relation to your focal length by researching the 500 rule and applying it….
…or you can do what I do and that is use a Polar Aligned Equatorial Tracking Mount.
There is a learning curve to using one of these mounts. In a nutshell, you align the tracker to the star Polaris (if you are in the northern hemisphere). Once that alignment is achieved you can position your camera how you want and turn the tracker on. The tracker will then rotate in the reverse relationship to the earths rotation keeping aligned to the position in the night sky that you have your camera pointed. This allows you to use longer shutter speeds, narrower apertures and lower ISOs while keeping starts tack sharp. One thing to be aware of is that land objects will be blurred but there is an antidote for this (composite images). I don’t want to give away too much here as I have plans on the horizon (pun not intended, but also not avoided) to add more interest to my Milky Way Photography.
While I’m just getting started on this journey, I’m excited to build upon what I’ve learned and add techniques from other photographic disciplines to my tool chest. This is a rabbit hole to fall into and there certainly a lot more skills and techniques to learn but there is no reason to let a lack of equipment prevent you from getting started with Milky Way photography.