January 2, 2019
The Offseason
During the winter months in the northern hemisphere the galactic center of the Milky Way is not visible. So what should a astrophotographer do when the interesting bits of the Milky Way are not visible. Either go to the southern hemisphere or concentrate on photographing something else in the night sky. There are things in our night sky here in the north that are absolutely beautiful. Some you can see with the naked eye even in the most light polluted areas(I can see the Orion nebula here in Glendale).
The technical stuff…
So photographing these wonders in the sky should be easy, I’ve been photographing the Milky Way for the past 2 years. While some things are the same(no moon in the sky, a dark place, and a skytracker), some techniques needed to capture these deep space objects are quite different. Rather than using a wide angle lens, you need to use a telephoto lens, which means that you need a shorter exposure time(the rule of 500: 500/focal length*crop factor), so what would be a 20 second exposure for a Milky Way shot becomes a 1 second exposure with at 200mm lens. While a startracker will relax the 500 Rule, the precision needed to take a really long exposure is difficult to achieve.
Read MoreDuring the winter months in the northern hemisphere the galactic center of the Milky Way is not visible. So what should a astrophotographer do when the interesting bits of the Milky Way are not visible. Either go to the southern hemisphere or concentrate on photographing something else in the night sky. There are things in our night sky here in the north that are absolutely beautiful. Some you can see with the naked eye even in the most light polluted areas(I can see the Orion nebula here in Glendale).
The technical stuff…
So photographing these wonders in the sky should be easy, I’ve been photographing the Milky Way for the past 2 years. While some things are the same(no moon in the sky, a dark place, and a skytracker), some techniques needed to capture these deep space objects are quite different. Rather than using a wide angle lens, you need to use a telephoto lens, which means that you need a shorter exposure time(the rule of 500: 500/focal length*crop factor), so what would be a 20 second exposure for a Milky Way shot becomes a 1 second exposure with at 200mm lens. While a startracker will relax the 500 Rule, the precision needed to take a really long exposure is difficult to achieve.
M31
While I was up at Red Rock taking pictures of Orion, I focused my old NX500 on another object in the sky that looks like a fuzzy star. While a nebula may have hundreds or thousands of stars, this object has billions of stars; it’s our local neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. Both pictures from Red Rock where shot with short*(under 4 seconds) exposures and multiple pictures were put together to get enough light to see the objects. However, I found this technique a bit less than optimal and now use a method of shooting fewer, but longer shots.
*I was getting star trails when I tried to shoot multi-minute exposures with the startracker.
