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.
Orion
This is a “wide shot” of Orion, I say “wide shot” because it was taken at 50mm on my 16-50mm zoom lens. Here you can see Orion’s belt(the 3 stars just above the center of the photo) and Orion’s sword at the center. The fuzzy red “star” is what we’re most interested in, the great Orion nebula. The nebula is composed of quite a few stars and more are being formed in it on a constant basis. The red glow is hydrogen atoms being charged by the immense heat from these stars and emitting a reddish light.
