Astrophotography can be divided into two camps: terrestrial and deep space. Both can be equally challenging for different reasons. But recent advances in technology have also made both more attainable and enjoyable.

I've been an amateur astronomer since I was around 11 years old. I had an uncle, a retired engineer, who had a small reflecting telescope, and when I saw Saturn for the first time I was hooked. Photography through a telescope came much later for me, and it was a very difficult undertaking in the film days. I remember taking some star shots to the drugstore for processing, and they told me they threw them away because there were just a bunch of white spots on them, and I should take better care to learn how to take pictures. Oh well.

Comet NEOWISE is one of the brightest comets to visit earth for some time and can be seen right now in skies throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Here are some of the best tips for photographing it successfully.

You may remember my 2019 review of the original Arsenal hardware. It was a block box you attached to your DSLR or mirrorless camera and it automated many of the tasks photographers face on a regular basis. The Arsenal sold quite well. While it had some good points that could speed or improve a photographer's workflow, it left a lot of buyers unhappy and it seemed to wind up on a lot of shelves and in a lot of drawers, rather than in camera bags. Now we've got Arsenal 2.

Astrophotographers and even regular photographers have a chance at a comet that is now appearing in our early morning, pre-dawn skies. I'm talking about Comet C/2022 E3 ZTF, rapidly approaching its closest encounter with our sun. It hasn't been to our part of the solar system for about 50,000 years. It's a striking green in color, and not all comets are, so it's created a stir among astrophotographers.

Wide field astrophotography is quickly becoming an established niche that is increasingly available to more hobbyist photographers with the availability of better, smaller, and cheaper tracking mounts. But the smallest galaxies, nebulae, and planets have always been prohibitively expensive to capture. Can this lens change that?

After five years, NASA’s space probe Juno arrived at Jupiter in 2016, carrying with it Junocam, a two-megapixel camera featuring a Kodak image sensor. This camera continues to reveal more mysteries about the red planet.

I’m occasionally asked to recommend a camera to get into astrophotography. Of course, my first answer is to use the camera and lenses you already have. Beyond that, it’s difficult to recommend a specific brand and model because I don’t have every camera at my disposal, and we are blessed (cursed?) with a continuous stream of new and improved cameras. Here are some thoughts.

Hype for Google’s new flagship phone has intensified in recent weeks with photographers excited about what new technology the tech giant will be squeezing into its latest model. To add to the fervor, a leaked promo video suggests that a dedicated astrophotography mode will be incorporated.

Night photography can be technically daunting. Even with modern cameras, it's not easy to capture high-quality night photos. While photographing the stars already requires high ISOs combined with wide apertures, capturing details in the landscape is even more difficult in the dark. In this article, I walk you through my night photography workflow, which combines image averaging with time blending and focus stacking to achieve high-quality results.

With all the fanfare this past year over the latest developments in camera technology, it's easy to get caught up in gear envy. And that's completely natural. But what if there's a better camera out there that most of us have forgotten about?

Astrophotography has quickly become incredibly popular these days, with the advent of increasingly smaller and affordable star trackers, and not to mention the global pandemic, which has forced people to make do with photographing what is immediately around them, or above them.

If you shoot a lot of astrophotos, you know all about gradients. They are almost always present in your images, and they have to be removed to smooth out the sky background and make your images look their best.

Astrophotography is one of the few genres where gear can make a profound difference that is impossible to replicate without it. One of the most important tools — if not the most important tool — is the lens on the front of your camera.

If you have not realized it yet, Comet NEOWISE is on the night sky. This is a big event for astrophotographers and photography enthusiasts alike.

Astrophotography has a high skill ceiling, particularly when you start to introduce trackers. In this video, a veteran astrophotographer takes on a challenge and has a few learning experiences.

It’s the time for many of us to see and photograph the auroras. Sadly, that generates a lot of invalid arguments about how the images should or should not look. But here's how you can capture them in all their glory.

Editing pictures of the Milky Way is difficult to get right. Which white balance do you use? How bright should the scene be? How do you remove excessive noise without stars disappearing? Well, follow these eight steps for image editing success on the galactic scale with Lightroom Classic.

Astrophotography has become more popular than ever, in no small part due to the global pandemic, but also due to the availability of inexpensive portable tracking mounts.

Australian Dylan O'Donnell's over-the-top astrophotography adventure videos often introduce us to new equipment. But his "HOTTEST New Astrophotography Products in 2022" video caught my eye. At the very least, it's a bit presumptuous to think that the hottest products come out in the first half of the year!

Canon has just announced their longest zoom lens for the RF mount, the RF 200-800mm f/6.3-9 IS USM ,and we’ve tried it in the real world. How was it? Pretty damn enjoyable! Is it worth considering? We certainly believe so! But there is a downside to it. Let’s have a proper look at the new telephoto.

You have likely already seen nighttime time-lapses in which the rotation of Earth causes the night sky to move. This incredibly neat time-lapse flips that on its head by holding the Milky Way stationary, showing the ground tilting as Earth continues to rotate and making for quite the mindblowing effect.

Over the years, I've been following the software offerings of Italian astrophotographer Angele Perrone. He aggressively updates his Photoshop extensions, and he adds a lot of very simple functions that would be difficult to accomplish in Photoshop without a lot of time and trouble. So, here's a look at Astro Panel Pro 6 for Photoshop.

The recent addition of an astrophoto time-lapse mode (uncovered by XDA Developers) coming to Google’s camera app on their Pixel line of phones piqued my interest. Not that I think it will replace all of our “real” cameras, but I do have a deep appreciation for the engineering wizardry required to push right up to the physical limits of a tiny sensor and lens. And as an astronomy enthusiast, any developments that might open an appreciation of the night skies to a wider population get me very interested.

Landscape photography as a genre can be perceived as quite repetitive to some. However, to others, it can be a multifaceted challenge depending on the light, conditions, and locations that we choose to photograph!

If you roll back the clock to around 300 years ago, America was still in its infancy years. It was a time before the Revolutionary War, and the slave trade was thriving across the world. Across the Atlantic Ocean, in England, a small sapling was beginning to grow which would later become an icon, until now.

Astrophotography is a tremendously challenging genre, requiring specialized equipment, excellent technique, a lot of knowledge, and loads of patience. However, when you get a good image, it is all worth it, as you can capture some of the most remarkable photos of our universe. This great video follows an astrophotographer as he captures what he considers to be the best photo he has taken so far.

Nowadays, photographers who use APS-C cameras have a pretty good selection of third-party lenses on the market that are capable of professional results, and this is becoming especially true in the ultra-wide arena.

One of the biggest confusions that you might notice as you venture into astrophotography is that photographers and astronomers measure their equipment differently. Photographers tend to refer to their lenses in terms of their focal length, while astronomers refer to their telescopes by the diameter of their opening. Thus, a 75mm f/6 telescope has a focal length of 450mm. Meanwhile, a 75mm camera lens at f/6 has an aperture of 12.5mm. If a photographer is told that someone is shooting a 155mm lens hand-held, it would not raise an eyebrow, but an astronomer told the same thing would be incredulous! I can only barely lift my 155mm telescope onto its mount!

It seems each recent camera announcement has brought a higher megapixel count — including Sony's latest 60mp+ release. But whether you're shooting on 24mp APS-C, 50mp full frame, or 100mp medium format, you might not be getting all the resolution you paid for. Check out this list for 3 clarity-robbing problems and their fixes.

The Seestar S50, a portable smart telescope, is revolutionizing astrophotography by making it accessible and straightforward for everyone. This great video review showcases the S50's capabilities, emphasizing how it simplifies the process of capturing celestial images without requiring prior photography experience.

Aside from the Perseid meteor shower, the summer hype is on for viewing Saturn. Indeed, Saturn is a great target for visual observers, especially if it’s your very first view through a telescope. But for astrophotographers, it’s a tough target. A bit of an easier target is Jupiter, which is “following” Saturn across the summer sky.

Are you using the right lenses for landscape astrophotography? The traditional goto lens for landscape used to be a 16-35mm or thereabouts, as long as it had a maximum aperture of f/2.8, it could double for night duty.

Shooting landscapes at night often calls for gear that isn’t entirely essential for shooting during the day. Here are some suggestions for shooting single images, as well as star trails and time-lapse photography.

I've been doing astro-imaging for more than 20 years. Originally, there were not a lot of editing options, but over the years that has changed. But Astro Panel 5 offers some intriguing options.

Canon's mirrorless lenses have gotten off to quite an impressive start, though the bodies still have some catching up to do when it comes to innovation. Canon might be pushing that envelope a bit next year, though, as new rumors have uncovered the potential release of the ROS Ra, a full frame mirrorless camera designed specifically for astrophotography.

When you think of astrophotography, you probably think of expensive equatorial mounts, pricey wide aperture lenses, and top-of-the-line full frame cameras with excellent high ISO performance. But if you don't own all of that and are interested in trying it out, you might find this great video tutorial quite helpful, as it'll show you what's possible with just a crop sensor camera and kit lens.

Over the last few weeks I’ve talked with several adventure, wildlife, and landscape photographers about the Canon R5. I think that Paul Zizka’s four-word summary has been the most direct expression of satisfaction to date: it has it all.

Astrophotography is one of the most rewarding but complex genres of photography. There are a lot of steps that go into creating a great image of the night sky and Milky Way, and what better way to learn than to watch somebody do it from start to finish.

As you’re probably aware from the level of hype in your news feed, the Perseid meteor shower is approaching and you should get outside to see it now! Technically in late July, it is already active in our skies, but the reality is that there is a fairly narrow window of high activity only around the peak time. My own experience is that the number of meteors drops off dramatically a day before or after the peak evening.

What does it take to create an amazing landscape photograph? So many photographers, me included, have been guilty of creating beautiful content that portrays only the successes of landscape photography. In today's free landscape tutorial, I'm going to share some of the failures.

There are a lot of good tutorial resources out there, some of them free, but for the most part if you want a high quality video tutorial, you'll need to pay. Well, this is a rare exception.

A California-based astrophotographer has taken what is being called the world’s clearest picture of the moon. The process involved patiently placing together thousands of images of different lunar phases in order to showcase the entirety of the moon’s surface.

Some months ago, I was excited enough to place a preorder upon hearing of the announcement of Sky-Watcher’s Star Adventurer GTi, the latest in their Star Adventurer series of star trackers. In September, I finally received it and have been checking it out. Let’s see if it has indeed met my expectations.

Long exposures and high ISOs can bring out hot pixels. Worse than just regular high ISO noise, hot pixels are those little brightly colored dots that stick out like a sore thumb. Their random nature has made them tough to deal with effectively, until now. Want to know the easiest way to get rid of them?

Editing astrophotographs can be tricky as there's a lot to go wrong, especially when working with the Milky Way. Thankfully, Lightroom has some powerful features that can help transform drab snaps to galactic masterpieces.

Fatherly advice is something of value that most of us would adhere to. Recent news tells of a striking example of such value: A father's wise counsel to hold on to some cheaply acquired film footage should soon lead one former NASA intern to riches.

If you’ve been shooting (landscape) astrophotos for a while but are relatively new to astronomy, you may be contemplating stepping up to a telescope for your astrophotography. But taking the next step isn’t as simple as getting a longer lens for more magnified views. You should understand the changes in your shooting and equipment that this implies.

Astrophotography is a tricky business, even if you happen to live in the Namib desert. However, if you don't live in such a remote location, you'll likely have struggled with light pollution. In recent years, we have seen a number of filters designed to help with this problem. But do they work?

If you’re into astrophotography, a drone typically isn’t your camera of choice. That’s why I was surprised to see Haida’s release of a light-pollution reducing filter for the new Mavic 3, which they’re calling the NanoPro Clear-Night Filter. Does this filter change the experience of shooting with a drone at night?