Earlier in the summer, a dazzling planetary alignment took place, showcasing Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, and Saturn across the night sky. According to Sky & Telescope, the last time this happened was in 2004, and if you missed it, you’ll need patience. The next alignment won’t take place until 2040.

Photographers had a field day (or night) capturing the phenomenon, and we caught up with one, Hawaii-based Andrew Hara, who put a unique spin on the view by photographing it at one of the state’s culturally significant sites, Mauna Kea.

Related: Best cameras for astrophotography

A symbol of Hawaiian cultural history

“Mauna Kea is a very special place here on the island,” Hara writes to PopPhoto. “Along with being a culturally rich and significant location, the particular location came to mind as it also represents its own unique alignment with Hawaiian cultural history. It was either going to be here or in Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, but Mauna Kea also resides at 13,796 feet, much higher than the cloud layer that rests right around 9,000 feet elevation. With how special Mauna Kea feels, it felt right to head up there. The timing was also very critical and Mauna Kea felt like the best place to view from being above the clouds without a lot of concern of fog and clouds rolling in.”

The image, of course, didn’t pull together by itself. Hara spent a week planning and understanding when and how he should photograph the alignment. With the help of an augmented reality app, Hara was able to track and calculate the timing, which required a 4 a.m. call time. But, it almost didn’t happen—Hara credits his mentor for challenging him to push forward.

“What compelled me to go out and capture it was originally sourced from my teacher asking if I would be able to go out and capture a view of the alignment as a collaborative project together with his knowledge,” he shares. “Glad he pushed me to go out and photograph it; I’m not sure if I would have gone out without that extra push for an early morning shoot!”

Related: Best telescopes

Hara’s tips for budding photographers

Whether you’re looking to nail the next planetary alignment shot in 2040, or you’re simply wishing to improve your astrophotography chops in 2022, Hara has some tips on creating a great image. 

“Just experiment! Try new things, settings, and times of year to see what best works for you. No one camera and lens set up is perfect and it should feel like there is a flow in the process with the result of an image that you are happy with,” he shares.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you need specific gear. For his own photos, Hara employed a Canon mirrorless camera and the Canon RF 15-35mm, 24-70mm, and Sigma 35mm f/1.4 lenses. However, he says it’s perfectly fine to go with what you’ve got—especially if you’re just starting out. 

“Shoot with what you have and start there! Getting the biggest and baddest camera is great, but there is a special appreciation that builds when one can understand the capabilities and limitations of a particular setup before going to the next,” Hara advises. “Look at other work to see what may make a great photo but don’t stick only to that. Use it to influence your own work to produce something that represents you well, rather than just technically looking good. We often get so caught up in tech that we forget that a photographer’s vision and abilities in post-production are where an image may truly transform from a common astrophoto into something that may be able to evoke a sense of awe and wonder.”

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The moon is a photographic tease. It hangs up there in the sky, all big and bright. Then you try to take a picture of it and you get a pathetic white blob floating in a sea of digital noise and darkness. It’s frustrating, especially when you’re experiencing a super moon, or a blood moon, or a harvest moon, or any of those other moon phenomena that don’t really mean anything, but are extremely good at helping websites rack up page views and Instagram users gather likes.

But, while the earth’s little lunar buddy can be a pain to photograph, the results can be rewarding. Here are some tips for photographing a full moon, no matter what kind of camera you have, or what kind of media hype that particularly moon brings with it.

Plan your shot

Let’s start with the bad news: Stumbling across a beautiful moon and expecting to capture it with your smartphone is extremely unlikely to happen. In fact, you’ll probably end up with something like this mess.

Bad moon photo

Gross, right? That’s because your smartphone—at least on its own—isn’t designed to snag a shot this kind of shot. The lens is too wide, the sensor generates too much digital noise, and the lens is often smudged with goop from your pocket that streaks the frame. It’s not pretty. So, it’s worth it to visualize the shot you want, and that will help determine the gear and technique you’ll want to use.

Sites like In-the-sky.org are a good reference for planning lunar events, or just tracking regular moon activities.

Using a dedicated camera

Your best bet for shooting the moon is an advanced camera with exposure controls and a long, telephoto lens. For the shot below, I used a full-frame Canon 5D Mark III DSLR with a Tamron 150-600mm zoom lens and an extender attached. If you don’t know anything about the numbers associated with zoom lenses, 600mm is extremely long. In fact, it’s longer than most of the big, white lenses you’ll find on the sidelines of pro sporting events.

Luckily, you don’t need $10,000 worth of gear to make a solid shot happen. Any modern interchangeable lens camera with access to a zoom lens will do the trick. Even a compact camera with a long zoom lens built in can work, although if it does make things a little trickier.

Pick your longest telephoto lens. If you’re not sure which is which, you’ll want to check the focal length of the lens, which is typically noted as a range, like 18-55mm or 70-200mm. The higher the number, the more zoomed in your view will be.

When using a camera with a built-in zoom lens, it gets a little more complex. As you zoom toward the telephoto end of the camera’s range, it can’t let in as much light (because the aperture gets smaller). As a result, it needs to crank up the sensor’s light sensitivity, which increases digital noise. You might have to do a little experimenting to find the perfect balance of zoom and noise for your specific camera, especially if it’s something with a monstrous 50x zoom. Many cameras also offer “digital zoom,” which you should ignore because it’s just cropping in on the image, which you can do better in post.

Super moon

Setting up

You’ll want a tripod for this shot, not because it’s dark, but because telephoto lenses are a lot harder to keep steady and free of motion blur without a sturdy base.

Pick a spot with a clear view of the moon—going out the night before to track the rough path across the sky can help you get an idea of when everything will fall into place.

If you want a shot of just the moon, location doesn’t matter as much, but adding some foreground can help give the moon some context that helps it feel as big as it looks, or even bigger.

Sometimes the time you shoot will be determined by a specific event, like an eclipse, but otherwise, you can pick the time that works best for your composition. Shooting a moon as it comes up over the horizon, for instance, will make it look huge, especially in a “super moon” situation.

Set the camera

If you’re not familiar with camera exposure modes and terms, you’ll want to switch your camera to program mode, which is typically represented by a “P” on the mode dial. This is an automatic mode, but it allows you to adjust exposure using something called “exposure compensation.” You’ll have to look up the exact method for using exposure compensation on your specific camera, but chances are, you’ll have to reduce the overall exposure by -2 or even more.

Moon shots often trick camera light meters because it tries to average out the bright celestial body with the dark sky. You can usually tell when you’re getting it right because you’ll start to see some actual detail in the moon.

If you do know about camera settings, start with a low ISO setting—even 100 will work to start. Choose a small aperture like f/8 or f/11 to get the sharpest performance out of your lens and start with a shutter speed around 1/125. This might be too dark, depending on your location, but you can adjust as you see fit.

Super moon

Shoot the photo

Focusing on the moon should be pretty easy if your lens is long enough. If your camera lets you zoom in when using the back screen to compose a shot, that’s a great way to carefully check that everything is sharp. You can use the camera’s autofocus system, but if you find that it’s constantly zipping back and forth, looking for its subject (photographers call this “hunting”) then manual focus might be a better bet.

Once you’re ready to take the picture, use your camera’s self-timer mode to actually fire the shutter. Many cameras have a mode that will wait two seconds after you push the button to take the picture and that comes in handy here. Pushing the shutter button with your finger can introduce small amounts of camera shake and give you a blurry photo, even if you’re on a tripod.

Don’t take just one. Lots can go wrong with a photo like this, so shoot as much as you can while you have the chance.

If you can’t get close enough to get a really tight shot of the moon, don’t sweat it too much. You only need a picture that’s roughly 1000 x 1000 pixels to look great on Instagram, so there’s plenty of room to crop into files from most cameras.

View this post on Instagram

Space station supermoon. This composite image made from six frames shows the International Space Station (@iss), with a crew of six onboard, as it transits the Moon at roughly five miles per second on Dec. 2. The microgravity laboratory orbits our planet at 17,500 mph and is home to important science and research that will not only benefit life here on Earth, but will help us venture deeper into the solar system than ever before. This Moon also happens to be a supermoon, which is when a full Moon is also at or near its closest point in its orbit around Earth. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky #nasa #space #spacestation #internationalspacestation #moon #planets #solarsystem #transit #microgravity #science

A post shared by NASA (@nasa) on Dec 3, 2017 at 3:08pm PST

Shooting with your phone

The biggest challenge of a decent smartphone moon-shot is the lens. The simplest solution is to find a buddy with a telescope and borrow it. They make special adapters for attaching smartphone cameras directly to telescope eyepieces, but you can get a similar effect by just hand-holding it.

You want to make sure that you use your hand—or even some tape—to block light from coming in between the telescope and the smartphone camera. That can cause lens flare and haze that will ruin your otherwise fancy photo.

It will likely take a little monkeying around with it to get the exact distance from the phone to the viewfinder in order to get everything in focus, but luckily phones have storage for lots of photos and you can delete the stinkers later.

Editing the photos

No matter how you shoot the image, editing should be pretty straight forward. You can typically use the “daylight” setting for color balance, even if there’s an eclipse happening, which will give it a red cast. After all, that is reflected sunlight that you’re capturing.

If you know how to shoot in raw—something that both smartphones and dedicated cameras now do regularly—enabling it will keep all the image data you capture without compressing it to make a JPEG file. That gives you extra leeway when it comes to editing a finished image.

And if you see weird purple or green fringing around the moon, that’s an effect called chromatic aberration and it often happens at high-contrast edges, especially with cheaper lenses and optics. It’s simply the lens’s inability to correct for different colors of light refracting at different angles. You can fix it in post using something like Lightroom or Photoshop. Or, just switch it to the best hider of imperfections ever: black-and-white.

The post How to take a picture of the moon that doesn’t look like a tiny, white blob appeared first on Popular Photography.

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Meteor showers can be amazing things to photograph. (Here’s a NASA video explaining the phenomenon). But, before you point your camera upward, here are a few simple tips to make sure you get the most out of your night of shooting.

Find the darkest spot available
If you dwell in a big, bright city with a lot of lights, your chances of catching a worthwhile meteor image are going to be slim. You’re going to be dealing with long-exposures and wide-open apertures, which means any environmental light will creep into the frame and overpower the image. If possible, get out into the country where streetlights and neon signs are few and far between. Just be sure to pack a flashlight for navigating your gear in the dark.

Stock up on coffee (or just sneak in a nap)
The best viewing time starts around midnight, but things will start getting more exciting as the night goes on. Shooters who can stay out until the early morning hours before sunrise will be rewarded with a more active show.

Bring a cable release
Everybody knows that a tripod is an absolute must for long exposures, but the value of a good cable release is often underestimated. Keeping your finger off of the camera’s shutter button will help prevent blurred images, especially if your tripod’s head isn’t the sturdiest one around. If you don’t want to buy a cable release, you can also use your camera’s self-timer to keep your shutter finger from blurring your image.

Consider putting something in the foreground
If you fill the viewfinder with only sky, you’re going to end up with a bunch of light streaks on the frame and not much else. Experiment with putting other things in the frame, even if they’re dark (like mountains) and only create silhouettes. It will up the difficulty level, but will also probably result in more satisfying overall images. RAW capture will also help since it allows you to tweak your white balance later.

Use a wide, fast lens
Those bright little wonders won’t be in front of the lens very long, so in order to make the most of each one, it’s best to keep your aperture open wide. And because they’ll appear so sporadically, having a wider lens will greatly increase the chance that you’ll actually capture one (or more) over the course of the night.

Choose the proper ISO
Here in the day of digital, this is a simple task that can be achieved through trial and error. Each camera model react differently during low-light long exposures, so start at ISO 800 and adjust accordingly. You’re going to get some noise, but it’s best to try and avoid the obnoxious, brightly-colored pixel noise often associated with digital cameras and extremely long exposures. To help, you can try the dark frame technique described here by astronomical photographer, Jerry Lodriguss.

Determine your exposure time
Most digital cameras can easily a handle a 30-second exposure before noise starts getting out of hand. That’s a great place to start. That’s also short enough to keep stars from becoming light streaks due to the rotation of the earth.

Charge your batteries in-full before heading out
Even if your camera isn’t begging for more battery power, it’s worth topping off before heading out for a night of long exposures. With shutter times that long, you’ll find that you’ll get many fewer frames out of a single charge than you would in a normal shooting situation. Lower temperatures will also drag your battery performance down even more, so winter shooting requires even more batteries in reserve to ensure you don’t run out of juice in the field.

Know where to point your camera
The direction of the meteor paths will vary depending on a wide variety of factors, so putting in some research on Google before you head out will likely pay off greatly. One spot may work great for one meteor shower and not work at all for another. Watch for a few minutes without the viewfinder in front of your eyes to get a feel for where they’re coming from and where they’re going.

Keep shooting
Like lightning, meteors are very unpredictable, which is part of what makes capturing them with a camera so satisfying. Don’t be afraid to shoot away, one frame after another. There’s nothing more frustrating than having the shutter snap shut just a few seconds before a choice streak shoots across the sky.

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Tonight is going to be an incredibly rare combination of astronomical events. Not only are we set to spot a total lunar eclipse that’s visible in the USA for the first time since 2010, but Mars will also be unusually large and bright in the sky. Which makes it the perfect opportunity to get out and try some astrophotography.

Tonight’s total lunar eclipse will be the first of four in a set, running early morning April 15th, October 8th, and then next year on April 4th and September 28th—what’s called a tetrad. At the same time, Mars is at the biggest and brightest its been in six years, and will actually appear next to the Moon in the night sky.

The best time to see the event will be at 3:00AM EST, midnight PST. And unlike solar eclipses, lunar eclipses last for hours at a time (and have a dramatic, deep red hue). Unfortunately, you will have to take into account local weather conditions, and it’s probably a good idea to drive away from the city to avoid light pollution.

If you’re just beginning to step into the world of astrophotography, luckily there are many guides out there to help you. This is a good look at how focal length changes the way the Moon will look, here’s an intro to shooting astrophotography, and here. If you’re interested in landscapes and timelapses, have a look at this, this, and this.

And no, there’s nothing about this set of lunar eclipses that makes them a “blood moon“, as all eclipses of this type are red—it’s just drumming up apocalyptic fears.

I, Luc Viatour [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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The night sky has inspired artists for millennia, and it is no less a muse for photographers today. What’s more, digital technology, including lower-noise sensors and the ability to enhance and combine images during postproduction, makes shooting stars more accessible than ever—and requires no special equipment. Here’s how three stellar masters get their shots.

Matt walker has what might seem to be an ideal occupation for a photography enthusiast: he’s a horticulturalist who manages estate gardens in the San Francisco Bay area.

“Photography and gardening go really well together,” he says. “My job requires that I know the weather every day, and I became pretty good at understanding the weather early in my career. I love shooting landscapes with clouds, and being outdoors keeps me in tune with the conditions. I’m usually the first person to call out to my photographer friends about the approaching clouds.”

Walker, 47, has been photographing since his high school days, but began star photography only about two years ago. “I have always loved the stars, and after seeing some beautiful shots in magazines and on social photo sites, I had to try it for myself,” he says. “I have had the opportunity to shoot the night sky with some really good photographers this year, which helped me become a better star photographer.”

Walker often makes composite star images. “I want to be able to print my images large, and shooting the foreground at low ISO increases the sharpness and reduces noise,” he explains. “The stars at high ISO are not that bad printed large, but a foreground printed at high ISO looks horrible.” He adds, “All my shots are real, that is, the Milky Way was really there at the time, and I just shot the foreground in better light without moving my camera. I don’t want anyone to think I just blended a composite with some random Milky Way shot.”

His advice for photographers who want to try star shooting? “Just go for it, and experiment with different ISOs, and aperture settings,” he says. “A wide-angle lens that has a manual focus setting is mandatory—autofocus does not work at night.”

Besides having the obvious basics (camera and lens, tripod, remote-release cord), Walker urges careful planning ahead. “Finding a location with a good foreground—and making sure that you can remain in your location for a long time—is important,” he notes. “You don’t want to get kicked out by a park ranger when you are in the middle of your shoot. Dress for warmth, bring food and water, and a beach chair is nice when you are out in the field for several hours.”

Walker’s night portfolio is not limited to star shots; he takes plenty of land-, sea-, and cityscapes between sundown and sunup (you can see more at flickriver.com/photos/rootswalker). “Night photography has worked out really well for me because I have a family,” he says, “so when they go to bed, that’s my time to shoot.”

Walker says…

•Watch the weather. Cloud cover is an obvious deterrent to star photography, but remember, too, that “wind is a nightmare for long exposures.”
•Fast lenses, please. “A lens of f/2.8 or faster is best, but not mandatory. F/4 is as slow as I would go shooting the stars.” The slower the lens, the longer your shutter times will be.
•Be careful out there. Bring a headlamp and flashlight for finding your way to and from your car, and be aware of wild animals and any other hazards that may be in an area. “I also recommend shooting the stars with another photographer for safety.”

“I became interested in the night sky at a young age, long before I even had a camera,” says Darren White, a full-time professional photographer who now teaches workshops in night photography. “And once I had a good camera I was always trying to photograph the sky.”

White, 38, who recently relocated to Colorado (“It’s a whole new adventure out here—I am ready!”) is something of a purist when it comes to star shooting. “None of the work on my websites are composites,” he tells us. “I do all my work in single images, with selective adjustments in postprocessing. Sometimes I will create multiple exposures or blends for my own fun.”

White, despite his (relatively) young age, owes his photo­graphic expertise to the film era, “My first real camera was a 35mm Vivitar that my mom got for free from a magazine subscription back in the mid ’80s,” he relates. “She gave it to me, and I put some film in and started photographing my friends skateboarding. I was hooked. After that I quickly upgraded to an SLR, and then to a pro SLR. I learned how to develop and print my own work; working in a darkroom is one of the biggest advantages to learning about exposure—understanding how much light you need to properly expose a scene.”

Exposure, of course, is a critical factor in star photography, where shutter time may range from several minutes to an hour or more. “When working with single exposures it’s best to get it right in the camera,” White says. “Know how to calculate out exposures up to an hour long. Start with 30 seconds at ISO 1600 at f/4 and go from there. If you don’t like star trails and want pinpoint stars, then you will need the widest, fastest lens you can afford. The wider the lens, the more time you can expose without seeing movement.”

The rule of thumb: Each time you cut your ISO in half, you’ll need to double your exposure time, given the same f-stop. So if your camera is providing a good (if noisy) exposure of 30 seconds at ISO 6400, you’ll need 60 seconds at ISO 3200, 120 seconds (2 minutes) at ISO 1600, and so on.

While star photography requires no special equipment—the camera and lens you own, plus a tripod and a cable release or similar, are all you really need—White notes that the early going in nighttime photography can be frustrating. “One of the biggest issues photographers have with photographing the night sky is how to focus,” he says. “Not all lenses will allow you to be crystal clear at infinity.” (Editor’s note: Since the advent of autofocus, manually setting an AF lens to the infinity mark may not guarantee sharp focus.) “Learn how to focus your camera on a moonless night so the stars are clear. I suggest you do this in the day, and put a mark on your lens so you know where ‘infinity’ is on that lens. This will save you considerable time.”

Another issue is digital noise, which is exacerbated by both the dark field of the sky and long exposure times. “I often see photographers get frustrated because they have way too much noise from a long exposure from their older crop-sensor camera,” White says. “I always suggest renting a camera that is a few steps up from your current model to see the difference it makes with night-sky photography.

Sensor heat is also a major issue. The longer the sensor is on, the more heat it creates, add that to a warm humid night in the desert, and it will increase your noise. Take the same picture with the same settings on a cold, clear, winter night and your noise will be much lower. As it was with the image I am sharing with you here—the temp outside that night was right at 10 degrees—very cold.”

Knowing geography (and star charts) helps too. In the image seen here of Mount Hood, taken from the Timberline Lodge in Oregon, White knew that “the North Star is always over Mount Hood, so I knew that a long exposure would give a circular effect to the star trails.”

And it helps to enjoy being outside, in the dark, away from the crowds. “I do love the outdoors,” White says. “I grew up on the Oregon coast, and once I could drive I would spend my evenings at the beach photographing the sunsets. I moved to the Portland, area in 1999 and fell in love with hiking to my destinations and just exploring in general.” You can see lots more of his excellent outdoor shots at darrenwhitephotography.com.

White says…

•Take a workshop. “Learn from the pros the how’s and why’s of night photography,” he says. “We have done all the research and learned from trial and error.”
•Get (and stay) in shape. The best places for star photography are away from civilization. “There are so many undiscovered places that people will never see because they simply don’t want to put forth the effort it takes to explore and do a little bushwhacking,” he says.
•Don’t assume it’s all your fault. Noisy images in nighttime shots? Maybe it’s your gear. Huge strides have been made in noise control in recent camera models. White suggests you rent a newer camera body (with larger sensor) to see if it makes a difference.

Masahiro miyasaka came to photography relatively late, with the purchase of a Canon EOS Kiss Digital (the name in Japan for the EOS Digital Rebel) 10 years ago, when he was in his mid-30s. It was purely by chance; Miyasaka had casually read about the camera in a magazine and thought he would give it a try.

But from the very first photograph he took, it was clear to Miyasaka that photography was, both figuratively and literally, in his stars. “I shot a rose. It was very beautiful. I felt the universe inside it,” he says.

With his discovery that star photography is relatively easy with a digital SLR, he has produced a stunning body of work that shows the universe in the smallest of objects, and the shape of tiny things in the pattern of stars.

“A lot of people are interested only in stars,” says Miyasaka, 46, a specialist in factory automation. “But the universe and the patterns of flowers and shells are similar. I think the universe is hidden in the familiar world. Look for both at the same time—the stars and the flowers on the ground. There will be a new discovery for you.”

Besides flowers and shells, Miyasaka includes leaves, trees, rocks, ice formations, bodies of water, temples, and even creatures like frogs in the foregrounds of his star shots, which are, as you might imagine, done primarily with wide-angle lenses such as the 16–35mm zoom used for the image here.

None of these photographs are composites. “I will not composite in processing, no. Only one shot for all of them,” he insists. This is not to say that Miyasaka’s images are straightforward one-click shots; far from it.

The image here is one of his simpler ones, a long exposure during which he painted in illumination on the cherry blossoms with a Panasonic LED flashlight.

Images of smaller objects can get considerably more complex. In one example, a photograph of three blossoms against a background of a mountain and stars, Miyasaka’s bulb exposure started at f/2.8, with focus at infinity for the background. About a minute into the exposure, he illuminated the flowers with an LED lamp, using a different power ratio according to the distance of the flowers from the camera. Then, with the shutter still open, he stopped down to f/22 and refocused the lens on the near flower, and again painted in light with an LED. In effect, the final image is a multiple exposure made during one opening of the shutter. Miyasaka diagrams the procedure on his Flickr website, www.flickr.com/photos/43894176@N07/. (Obviously, you need a lens with manual aperture and focusing rings for techniques like this.)

Miyasaka also color-coordinates his foreground lighting with the color of his subjects. “For yellow flowers, use a yellow LED. A white LED is beautiful for white or pink flowers,” he says. He will also use accessory flash units, such as his Canon Speedlites, to illuminate foreground elements.

It may surprise readers to learn that Miyasaka commonly uses a soft-focus filter, namely a Kenko Pro1D Pro Softon, which produces the most blurring of the point-light sources in the frame. “Digital imaging devices produce, small, sharp images of the stars,” he notes. “This is not interesting. A soft filter makes for bloated stars—the pale blur is beautiful.”

Another off-the-beaten-path technique that Miyasaka employs can be seen in the angle of view of his photographs. While he makes plenty of star shots at the traditional angle—toward the horizon, aimed slightly upwards to take in both earth and sky—some are taken straight up, or nearly so. And why not? Haven’t you ever, on a brilliantly clear night, stared straight up at the canopy of stars?

As far as advice for prospective star shooters, Miyasaka says the same thing all astrophotographers do: get out of town. “A lot of people live in the city,” he says. “The night sky of the city is so bright that there are very few stars. I live in the country, with many high mountains. And the air is clean in Nagano. Photographers need to go out to the mountains, and to the sea.”

Miyasaka Says…

•Sharpness isn’t everything. The dreamy, ethereal quality in his photos is due to deliberate softening of the stars with a Kenko Softon filter, which produces the most blur on point-light sources, leaving other elements relatively sharp.
•Use phosphorescent tape. Put bits of this on aperture rings, infinity focus marks, and any commonly used controls so that you can find them in the dark without resorting to a flashlight.
•Always include an element besides the stars. “I’m not interested in only stars. I’m interested in flowers and stars—because I feel the stars in the flower.”

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As the image sensors in digital cameras continue to improve, night photography is becoming increasingly popular and much more accessible. It’s now possible to shoot in a complete lack of light without the need for a pro-grade camera. Star trails, an exciting sub-genre of night photography, takes already long exposures and stretches them into hours to capture the stars as the Earth rotates throughout the night. There are two approaches to shooting star trails: you can use a single long exposure with a wide aperture lens and a low ISO or stack multiple long exposures using settings more common in night photography. Although this article will primarily discuss the multiple exposure method, there are many tips that apply to both approaches.

Night Photography Tips

Location
As with most photography, planning your shot is a key to its success. In addition to the normal factors, like weather, you’ll need to take a few other items in to consideration. When choosing the location of your shoot, you’ll want to consult a light pollution map (see below) to help find a suitable area. As you get further away from light polluted skies, you’ll be able to capture more stars in your frame and ultimately create a more exciting final image.

Once you have a general location selected, you can use resources like Google Maps to help find more specific areas that may have something interesting in your foreground.

Moon Phase
Before deciding on this next element, you’ll next need to visualize how you want your final image to appear. For the darkest skies possible, you’ll be shooting near or during the New Moon phase. With a lack of natural or artificial light, your foreground may show up as a silhouette.

If your intention is to have the star trails appear over a well-lit landscape, you’ll want to shoot while the Moon is near quarter lit. If you shoot during a Full Moon, the landscape will appear very bright and many of the stars will be washed out. There is not a right or wrong decision when it comes to these options, it’s all personal preference dependent on your desired results.

The Moon phase, as well as its rise and set time, can be found on most weather websites. Alternatively, you can also use a mobile astronomy app on your smart phone, such as StarWalk, PhotoPills, or Mobile Observatory.

Cardinal Direction
This next factor can make or break an image. It certainly will make planning your shot a little more difficult, but it can lead to spectacular results. Depending on which direction your camera is facing when you shoot, the stars will create different patterns in the sky over the course of the night. Once you have a better understanding of this, you can use the patterns the stars will create to help build a stronger composition.

Quite often, the elements surrounding you will dictate which direction you’re able to face while shooting. Shooting in any direction that faces a larger city in the distance will often result in portions of your image having less stars than others. This unevenness can throw off the balance of the images and ruin hours of work.

Let’s take a look at how facing your camera in different directions will yield different results.

Placing Polaris, the North Star, in your frame will create the more popular circular pattern. Stars closer to Polaris will appear to move less, so a higher number of exposures will help yield more exciting results. This is a great starting point if you have never photographed star trails. The eye-catching circular pattern is a bit easier to frame and also slightly more forgiving when it comes to planning your composition.

Placing the ecliptic (an imaginary line on which the planets travel along) in your frame while facing South / East will result in the stars traveling in three different directions. Along the ecliptic, the stars will have a very straight, horizontal path across your photo. On either side of the ecliptic, the stars will appear to curve away, towards either pole, North or South. The image below shows the ecliptic slightly off center to place the Milky Way closer to the opening of the pathway. This orientation can be slightly more difficult as an incorrectly placed ecliptic will result in awkwardly balanced star trails.

Facing South, in my opinion, creates some of the most difficult trail patterns to successfully incorporate in to your shot. Over time, the trails will form somewhat of a wall of stars. While difficult, shooting near dark skies can certainly aid in creating a unique and appealing image. In the example below, I decided to use this pattern to help highlight the Cape May Lighthouse.

Facing West / Northwest, as seen in this photo, will product similar results to shooting East / Northeast.

Shoot Duration
After you have your composition planned, one final and very important factor will need to be decided. The amount of time you spending shooting your star trails can create vastly different results. Depending on the vision you have for your final image, you may find yourself shooting anywhere from 20 minutes to an entire night in an effort to come home with one image. Shorter star trails are often shot while the Moon is present and the landscape is well-lit. Since there are less visible stars during this time, those that do appear will serve as more of a subtle compliment to the Moonlit foreground instead of the main draw to the image. On the other hand, longer star trails will often immediately stand out and if they are accompanied with the right foreground will really elevate an image.

To help illustrate this point, I’ve taken individual exposures and stacked the images to create the star trails at 15 minute intervals. This will give you a better idea of the impact of shooting for different lengths of times will achieve.

25 Seconds: 1 Exposure

15 Minutes – 36 Exposures

30 Minutes: 72 Exposures

45 Minutes: 108 Exposures

60 Minutes: 144 Exposures

75 Minutes: 180 Exposures

90 Minutes: 216 Exposures

There is nothing wrong with the length of the star trails in any of the images above; they simply show that more time spent shooting can lead to more dramatic results.

All of these factors can play an important role when planning a successful shoot. When they’re all taken in to consideration and planned for accordingly, they can help ensure you come home with an image to be proud to show the world.

EXTRA TIPS

• Star trails can often take a few hundred photos to create your final shot. With this in mind, plan accordingly when packing memory cards. It’s always better to have extra then to run out part way through the night.
• Make sure your batteries are fully charged and always bring extra! Temperatures are often colder at night and can drain batteries quicker than normal.
• If possible, bring a second camera to shoot single images with. When you’re traveling, it can be difficult to give your trails the proper time as it may be taking away from time you could possibly be obtaining additional images.

Jack Fusco is a photographer based in New Jersey. You can see more of his work on his site and follow him on Facebook. He also teaches photography workshops if you want to learn more about night photography.

The post How To: Plan Your Night Photography For Perfect Star Trails appeared first on Popular Photography.

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Check out the map above. It shows a strip of land across the USA that might be able to see and photograph the famous aurora borealis during the night this week. You can chalk up the impromptu sky show to some solar activity that’s currently affecting the night sky.

For much of the country, at least here on the east coast, it comes at a great time because it’s actually warm out. Typically, seeing the aurora down here happens when it’s extremely cold, so even if you go out and don’t see anything, there’s not much risk involved.

If you’re looking for tips on shooting, it’s a lot like other night sky photography in that you’re going to want a longer exposure (anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds, but it really depends on your technique) with a high ISO and a wide aperture. Breathtaking aurora photos usually take a little editing to get that pop, so don’t be discouraged if they don’t look crazy brilliant out of the camera.

From: Accuweather

The post FYI: You May Have a Chance to Photograph the Aurora This Week In the USA appeared first on Popular Photography.

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Are you hankering for an interesting subject for your next photo adventure? How about something light years away? Swiss photographer Fabian Oefner read Stephen Hawking’s popular treatise on recent advances in theoretical physics, The Universe in a Nutshell, and felt challenged to find universal truths—as Hawking does so well—in realities that are surprisingly close to home.

The result is Oefner’s series of images titled “Nebulae,” all of which, like the example above, could easily be taken for images made from the outer reaches of our solar system by the Hubble Space Telescope.

But no, this image doesn’t depict actual galaxies. Oefner’s subjects were the glowing tips of a fiber-optic table lamp, photographed against black with a 1:2 macro lens.

If you’d like to attempt a similar photo, get the right fiber-optic lamp. They’re available online and in lighting stores at prices starting at about $10. Look for one with black fiber-optic strands—only the tips should glow. The best will let you adjust color and sit on a black base. (If yours doesn’t, paint it black.) Consider buying more than one, because strands with differing size, density, and color will give a truer outer-space look.

Yes, as you probably guessed, Oefner’s image is a digital composite. His technique is much easier than you might think, however, because it requires no layer masks or laborious erasing of unwanted detail. Just set the right blending mode to each layer and start compositing.

Step 1
Gather your gear. Almost any DSLR will do, along with a close-focusing macro lens (preferably 1:1, but 1:2 will do) and a tripod that will let you shoot straight down.

Step 2
Build the set. Choose a location with no ambient light and dark floors. Place your subject (the lamp) on the floor, suspend the camera above it on a tripod, and aim the camera down. When shooting, keep your movement to a minimum in order not to set the fibers in motion.

Step 3
Determine exposure. Do this by testing, then locking in exposure in manual exposure mode. Oefner typically shoots at between 1/2 and 1 sec at f/8 or f/11, ISO 100, in RAW. The correct exposure will produce a completely black background, which is absolutely required here.

Step 4
Make the images. Oefner recommends shooting dozens. Between each, make very slight adjustments to the distance between the camera and subject, the color of the fiber optic strands, and the rotation of the lamp. For a shooting-star-like effect, jiggle the strands while the shutter is open.

Final Step
Combine images in software. Start with approximately 10 images in a single Adobe Photoshop document. Set the blending mode for each to Screen. Then shift the relative positions of the layers and add or remove layers until you have an approximation of outer space. Oefner has layered as many as 50 shots to produce one “universe.”

For more of Oefner’s scientifically inspired images, visit www.fabian oefner.com.

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Lost in Light from Sriram Murali on Vimeo.

If you tried to capture the recent meteor shower, you may have found things more difficult than expected. One common culprit for ruining epic night sky photography is light pollution from cities. Heavily populated areas throw so much light into the sky that it can almost totally wipe out the ability to capture celestial bodies effectively with long exposures. this clever video from Sriram Murali shows the effects of light pollution in a very nice time-lapse format.

Obviously, the areas with less light pollution provide more spectacular views of space. So, next time you’re thinking about getting out into the dark for some impressive views of space, make sure you take the time to get far, far away from the bright lights of the big (or even small) city.

If you want to find dark sky near where you live, there are several apps and maps available online to help you locate it.

From: PetaPixel

The post Watch This: Just How Much Does Light Pollution Affect Night Sky Photography? appeared first on Popular Photography.

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Comet Lulin and Saturn

What Is Astrophotography?

Astronomical photography of the night sky—the stars, planets, comets, clusters, nebulae, and galaxies. It can reveal things that are too faint for the human eye to see, even through a powerful telescope.

How does it differ from other night work? For long exposures, you have to compensate for the Earth’s rotation to avoid trailing. I use an equatorial mount to do this. When the focal length gets longer than about 400mm, you need to add a guidescope with a special CCD autoguider to precisely guide the main scope with camera.

What Gear Do You Use?

I shoot with a Canon EOS Rebel XS and an EOS 20Da, a DSLR made for astrophotography. For short focal lengths, I use the 18–55mm kit lens and old manual-focus Nikon lenses with a Fotodiox adapter. My main imaging telescope is an Astro-Physics 130EDT StarFire refractor with a 1040mm focal length at f/8. I also have a Stellarvue SV70ED with a focal length of 420mm at f/6. Sometimes I use a telecompressor to reduce the focal length on both scopes for a wider view and faster f-stop. I use a Losmandy GM100EQ German-equatorial mount on a special tripod.

How Long Are Exposures?

For deep-sky objects, usually one to several hours. You need longer exposures to gather more photons from these faint objects to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. But you can’t usually shoot a single long exposure because of the thermal signal. You have to shoot a series of short ones and stack them. I’ll shoot twelve 5-minute exposures and stack them in Images Plus, an astrophotography program.

Then What?

I use Images Plus to automatically subtract a master dark frame from each light frame to remove the thermal signal, and then align and stack the images. In Adobe Photoshop, I adjust color and contrast, and enhance faint details.

Where Do You Escape Light Pollution?

There are a few dark places in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. I also shoot in a dark-sky preserve in Cherry Springs, PA.

Any Advice For Newbies?

You can take beautiful photos of the night sky with any DSLR on a tripod. Twilight is good for the crescent moon or setting constellations. Use a wide-angle lens, focus on infinity, set ISO to 1600, and use the self-timer. Include a foreground element and take test exposures while experimenting with white balance to correct for light pollution.

New Jersey based Jerry Lodriguss (www.astropix.com), 56, turned his fascination with the cosmos and photojournalism skills into a career teaching others how to take out-of- this-world pictures.

The Trifid Nebula

Total Lunar Eclipse

Milky Way Star Gazers

The Veil Nebula

Comet Lulin and Saturn

ISS Solar Transit

Orion Rising over the Mullica River

Moon and the Pleaides

The Horsehead Nebula

The Andromeda Galaxy

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