Comet NEOWISE has been hanging around in night skies around the world for a little while now, and most photographers who have been blessed with clear skies have captured at least one shot of the comet. Beyond getting a good exposure, how do you process your astro shots for the best effect? In this tutorial, I'll show you how I edit mine.
Astrophotography is a tremendously challenging genre that requires some specialized techniques and knowledge, but when you nail a shot, the results can be jaw-dropping. If you are looking to improve your astro images, this excellent video tutorial will show you five great tips that will help you take better photos of the night sky.
The night sky is one of life's true gifts. Capturing its beauty in a single frame with a camera is one thing, but creating something with thousands of images takes some serious skill and not surprisingly, turns out pretty amazing.
The last supermoon of 2020 is on May 7, and it is a great chance to take an entrancing and unique image incorporating it into a landscape or cityscape of your choice. This excellent video will show you how to plan and take a supermoon photo worthy of framing and hanging on your wall.
Medium format cameras offer incredible image quality, and in recent years, they have become far more affordable. That being said, astrophotography has some pretty specific and extreme gear requirements. So, can medium format work for shooting the night sky? This insightful video takes a look at how it holds up.
One of the neatest experiences after buying a dedicated camera is pointing it at the night sky for the first time and capturing beauty that is invisible to the naked eye. Doing so takes some specialized technique, however. This excellent video tutorial will show you how to take a compelling nightscape shot using nothing but a basic camera, kit lens, and tripod.
A good Milky Way photo can be absolutely stunning, and there are a number of fantastic ways to incorporate it into landscapes or even portraits. This fantastic video will show you lots of great tips for improving your Milky Way photos.
A nighttime landscape shot with the Milky Way over the earth below can be dramatic and eye-catching, but they almost always require two separate exposures for the foreground and the sky to get the best image quality. Once you have your two images, you will need to blend them to create a single final frame, and this great video tutorial will show you how to do it using Photoshop.
Google Pixel 4's astrophotography mode made a bit of a stir when it was announced and I followed Google's blog about the production of that software. But can it really compare to a dedicated camera?
While most of the world is stuck at home, the good people at Irix prepared this very comprehensive guide to shooting Astrophotography.
Saturn, the sixth planet from the sun, is a beautiful gas giant, well known for its iconic rings. However, it is almost unfathomably far from Earth, making it a challenge for any photographer wanting to take an image of it. This great video follows an astrophotographer as he tackles the challenge of creating a photo of the planet.
When a passion project collides with a good cause, it's a win-win, and photographer and videographer David Zapatka's lighthouse photography project is just that.
The “Google Camera 8.1” update arrived back in November, and it’s taken a few months for users to notice that Google has quietly taken away functionality for certain models of phone: the ultra-wide lens no longer takes astrophotography images.
With the Perseid meteor shower set to peak over the next few nights, it’s time to pull together your gear for some awesome meteor shower photos. Want to know the essential items you have to bring for a successful shoot?
This video from Cuiv, the Lazy Geek, a YouTuber with a popular following in the astrophotography community, brings up some considerations for photographers who are dipping their toes into astrophotography, including broad considerations and commentary on differences and difficulties traditional photographers may find as they explore astrophotography.
I've taken a look at some earlier iterations of Astro Panel over the years, a plug-in designed for automating and enhancing both astrophotography and landscape photos. I found it a powerful addition to my editing arsenal, and it was easy to use but could do some very sophisticated editing. This new version from photographer Angelo Perrone adds more than 80 new astrophotography and landscape functions, as well as some features to support portrait editing.
Like many photographers, I love to see interesting astrophotography. There are plenty of stunning examples out there, usually featuring the Milky Way over a dramatic landscape. Also, like many photographers, I've tried my hand at astrophotography and have not quite gotten the same results. Unlike many other wannabe astrophotographers, my images make me feel happy.
If you are looking for great tips on how to improve your astrophotography and workflow, Alyn Wallace has released a great video with 5 easy to follow tips on how to improve your astrophotography and take it to the next level.
If you're looking at shooting NEOWISE or some astrophotography, which lens would be your best bet?
Some genres almost require post-processing of images to fully finish them, astrophotography being one of them. The post-processing techniques involved are rather particular, and this excellent video tutorial will show you how to edit an image with the Milky Way combined with a light-painted landscape, all using Photoshop.
Capturing deep sky objects from a city backyard presents a unique set of challenges due to light pollution, yet it remains a common practice for many astrophotographers. The comparison between images taken under dark skies and those captured from light-polluted backyards reveals significant differences, emphasizing the importance of sky quality in astrophotography.
Photographing the Milky Way is a bucket list item for most photographers, so here's the foundations for doing so, all in under five minutes.
In case you've never taken the time to just sit outside at night and look (or howl) at the moon, it's actually freaking awesome. The logical next step is to setup your gear and trying to photograph our lunar friend.
There is probably no other genre where light is at more of a premium than astrophotography, where ultra-wide apertures, high ISOs, and specialized equipment are the name of the game. This fascinating video shows what two professional astrophotographers were able to accomplish when limited to a very slow kit lens for their work.
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, everyone has moon fever. There has never been a better time to grab your camera and head outside to take a shot of our moon, and this excellent video will show you everything you need to know to do just that.
For 2021, the first event of the “eclipse season” is a lunar eclipse on the morning of May 26. The second is an annular solar eclipse on June 10. In an annular eclipse, the Moon appears too small to block the Sun out entirely, so at maximum eclipse, the Sun is visible as a ring (annulus).
The Perseid meteor shower occurs from July 17 to August 24, and peaks on the night of August 12. In order to make the most of this spectacular meteor shower, I've put together a complete list of everything you need to know in order to get great astrophotographs of the event.
Astrophotography takes a lot of technical savvy, patience, and careful post-processing, but the results can be absolutely stunning and well worth the time and effort. This excellent video tutorial will show you how to improve the colors in your deep sky images in Photoshop to make them really pop off the screen.
Of all the magical experiences I have ever photographed, spending nights under the Northern Lights are still my favorite memories. I have had some incredible moments under some incredible displays, and I also love to watch other photographers experience the beauty of the Northern Lights too. In this video by Andrew Allan, he travels to Arctic Norway and has an unforgettable night.
For those of us in the northern hemisphere, the Milky Way core season is sadly coming to a close for this year and we will not see it again for another 5 or 6 months. In this fantastic video by Jeroen Linnenkamp, he chooses seven amazing night-time subjects that can keep you shooting throughout those core-less months.
The National Solar Observatory recently released new images and video of the surface of the Sun, and they are the highest resolution ever taken, showing extraordinary and fascinating details.
After all the excitement we got last year from the comet NEOWISE, it's hard to believe that right now, there's another potential naked-eye-visible comet screaming through the solar system at 158,000 miles per hour.
Astrophotography is something that can be quite elusive for many, mainly due to where they live and the constant presence of light and light pollution, which can dramatically reduce the chances of detailed images of the distant stars and galaxies. If you are like me, living in Ireland, you will know of the constant battle that we have with clouds trying to ruin the day.
Photographing star trails is more than just taking pictures. It takes time to shoot on location, and it takes even more time to edit the images afterward. I have ten tips that can help you get amazing star trails.
To witness a solar eclipse is a once in a lifetime experience and to photograph two within 2 years is an amazing opportunity to leverage your experience to create incredible imagery. Ted Hesser was able to garner a second opportunity with the 2019 eclipse and put his ideas into motion with only weeks to spare before this year's eclipse to gather ideas and compose images that engage our humanity within the cosmos.
While the lunar and annular solar eclipses are fresh in our minds and travel is gradually returning to some semblance of normality, it’s a good idea to begin to think ahead to future eclipse photo opportunities (especially total solar eclipses) in the next few years. Why plan so far ahead? Unfortunately for most of us, the opportunities to photograph a solar eclipse within our lifetimes can be counted on a few fingers. Lunar eclipses are a little easier to plan for but still require some planning.
It has been 26 years since development started on the eventual successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. In that time, after numerous delays, cost overruns, one major redesign, and 10 billion USD, the James Webb Space Telescope has finally taken its first images.
Samyang/Rokinon recently unveiled its new AF 12mm f/2 lens for Sony mirrorless APS-C cameras, a prime that will delight keen astrophotographers. Just how good is this new lens?
We've seen Elon Musk's company SpaceX in the news consistently since their launch of the Starlink satellites, and with 12,000 set to be released into low earth orbit in the future, it might mean some pretty cool light trails for astro photos. Follow the steps below on how to take photos of the Starlink satellites from your backyard.
We've all seen the incredible first image of a supermassive black hole, but how on earth do you capture something so far away and that, by its very definition, consumes light?!
November’s astronomical events led me to plan for a week-long marathon astrophotography session. The catch was that it had to be around the full Moon, normally a frustratingly unproductive time for astrophotographers.
The moon is an easily looked over subject for landscape and astrophotography. For beginners it can be surprisingly difficult to capture well, and for veterans of photography it can be difficult to get it to align with all the elements of your frame. Here are seven great tips for capturing the moon more effectively.
Photographer and filmmaker Michael Shainblum takes us on a journey to capture a panoramic shot of the Milky Way over the popular photography and nature destination Crater Lake, Oregon.
La Palma is a small volcanic island located on the most north-westerly side of the canary archipelagos. Its location, topography, and clear sky facilitates astronomical observations and offers great creative opportunities.
Astrophotography is a genre with a lot of specialized equipment designed for very specific purposes, but a lot of photographers still use normal consumer cameras to create their images. What sort of images can you create with a camera specialized for the task? Check out this great video to see what is possible.
Tokina's original 11-16mm lens has been one of its most popular selling lenses for years offering up something a lot of companies couldn't: a fast and sharp ultra-wide angle lens at an affordable price. Is this new version going to continue the trend and be a successful upgrade for Tokina?
Did you know that before Hasselblad became the official camera of the moon, space exploration was photographed with modified versions of simple drugstore cameras?
The peak of the Perseid meteor shower is due to happen this weekend between the 11th and 13th. The Perseid meteor shower is one of the most impressive displays, with counts of over 100 meteors per hour during the peak. In this video from StarScaper, he goes into further details on how to photograph and edit meteor shower images.
One of the fundamental issues in astrophotography is the general lack of light. To combat this, many serious astrophotographers turn toward equatorial mounts to allow them to get more light, but this can create difficulties if you have a foreground subject as well. This helpful tutorial will show you how to composite a foreground shot with a tracked night sky shot.
Light pollution is a widespread problem, not just for astrophotography, but for anyone who simply enjoys looking at the night sky. And unfortunately, it looks like the problem is only getting worse.
