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.

With the digital age stacking techniques make it possible to shoot a star trail in the middle of a city. But when I got my hands on a great medium format camera, I also ran into a problem: the star trail had strange patterns in the stacked image. Fortunately I found out why this is, and how to avoid it.

Exploring the night sky provides photographers with a unique opportunity to capture the awe-inspiring beauty of celestial events and objects. For those passionate about astrophotography, understanding the dynamics of the night sky, including planetary alignments and deep sky objects, is crucial to planning their shoots and enhancing their portfolio. Here's what you can expect this month.

Astrophotography has always fascinated me, as the thought of capturing objects that are such unfathomable distances from Earth just blows my mind. This great video goes behind the scenes to show you the process of shooting one of the most well-known objects in the night sky and the sort of technique and effort that goes into producing a memorable image.

Focus stacking is a common technique used by landscape photographers for images in which ultra-deep depth of field and high levels of sharpness are desired. You can use it for nighttime landscapes that incorporate things like the Milky Way as well, though it takes some additional considerations. This excellent video tutorial will show you a workflow for the technique as well as offer some helpful tips to ensure you get the best quality images.

Tonight marks the peak of the Lyrid meteor shower, with plenty of meteors visible from mid to late April each year, so get your camera ready and learn how to capture them in all their glory.

For any landscape photographer who prioritizes getting the money shot over serendipitously stumbling on a picturesque scene, using apps to predict the weather and to visualize an image is a foundational aspect of their workflow. While there are some incredibly useful apps out there, there isn't much that could beat being able to virtually travel to a location and time.

Astrophotography is a very unique and tricky genre, but if you take the time to dive into it and learn how it is done, you can be rewarded with stunning images of the heavens. If you are interested in astrophotography, this great beginner's guide will answer a lot of questions to help you get you on your way to pointing your camera toward the night sky.

Anyone who's shot Comet NEOWISE has noticed one thing: it looks a bit small in the frame when shooting on wider lenses. That's why with the help of some image editing, creating a composite where we replace the sky may be the best way to produce a stunning comet composite.

Yes, you read the headline correctly, and the results are out of this world. NanoAvionics mounted a GoPro Hero 7 to an improvised selfie stick and attached it to their MP42 microsatellite to record the footage.

The night sky is photographed more today than ever before, and yet, dark sky areas are shrinking at incredible rates. That's something The World at Night (TWAN) program and Babak Tafreshi are trying to educate others on with this new book and the amazing collection of images within.

The Canon EOS Ra is a specialized camera, but one that is quite intriguing for anyone interested in astrophotography. This great video takes a first look at it to see if it is right for you.

Have you ever had a shoot fail to go as planned? How often do you come away with images that you love, but weren't expecting? Check out this video to see how Michael Shainblum makes the best of a sunset shoot that didn't pan out.

If spring has been a mixed bag of poor weather and few targets for you, as it has been for many of us, things are looking up as May rolls in. A total lunar eclipse highlights the list on May 15-16.

Photographing the stars is tricky and requires some know-how and preparation. Creating a time-lapse video, at night, of those same stars adds another level of difficulty on top.

The month of May closes out with a New Moon (moonless sky), to which deep sky astrophotographers always look forward. This month brings a potential bonus of an intense burst of meteors, perfectly timed for North American astrophotographers. In fact, it’s so perfectly timed (for U.S. residents) that it falls on a Monday evening of a U.S. three-day holiday weekend.

If you're fortunate enough to be somewhere in the world where you have the chance to photograph the northern lights, you'll want to be prepared to take some beautiful images. Hopefully, the tips and tricks in this video help to set you up for success.

Creating a 360 VR panorama (also referred to as 360x180 degree panorama) has been an interesting side-challenge to take on for photographers, but in the past few years, it has been simplified to the point where phones, such as the Google Pixel series, make taking a VR panorama practically a point-and-shoot affair. But shooting one of the night sky remains a worthy challenge.

As someone who produces a lot of timelapses and video content for YouTube, nothing excites me more than testing out a new piece of gear. So, when edelkrone asked me to review their latest motorized slider and panning head unit, I jumped at the opportunity to see what this kit could do.

It might seem like a strange thing to reduce the size of stars in a night sky photo, but if you want to better show off deep-sky objects, it can help bring them to the fore. With so many stars in the sky, it can be a bit of a tedious task, however. This great video tutorial will show you three different methods for reducing the size of stars both easily and efficiently.

It wasn't easy to put a man on the moon. Just ask photographer Christopher Sherman, who recently set out to pay homage to one of humanity's greatest feats, the Apollo 11 mission, when Neil Armstrong first set foot onto the moon 50 years ago.

Taking the leap into photography as a career can be a terrifying prospect, but on the other hand, some of us are simply not happy stuck in the tedium and repetition of a more traditional 9 to 5. This inspiring video essay discusses one man's journey from a 9-to-5 job in IT to professional astrophotography.

We photographers don’t always get the perfect sunset or clear starry night sky every time we head out to photograph desolate areas or national parks. This is when we can take a little post production know-how and can still create other worldly and dreamy images that capture the viewer’s eye. Skylum Software's Luminar 4 has just made that scenario easier and faster to do with its all-in-one software and very powerful artificial intelligence.

It takes more than a wide aperture and the right focal length to make a good astrophotography lens. Sigma's 40mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art lens offers a slightly longer but still reasonable focal length paired with that wide aperture, making it a potentially useful candidate for astro work. This great video review takes a look at the lens from an astrophotographer's perspective and the sort of image quality and performance you can expect from it.

It's a trip of a lifetime, after all. You'll to want to make sure you have the right gear with you when the bears start sparring or the leopard seals give chase to an unsuspecting penguin chick out for its first swim. I asked two experts in the field to provide their recommendations: Marius Coetzee, with Oryx Photo Tours, which operates in both northern and southern polar regions and Paul Zizka who runs his own photography workshops as well as working with OFFBEAT, running photo tours in the northern polar regions. I also guide with GAdventures, exploring Antarctica, and Frontiers North Adventures, leading adventures in Canada's sub-Arctic.

When Google announced that their Night Sight mode will now extend to astrophotography, many — myself included — were skeptical. Google have now written a blog post unpacking the new function.

The annual Lyrid Meteor Shower is nearly upon us, peaking on the evening of April 21-22. While it’s not the best of the annual meteor showers, it is a good opportunity to try your hand at the challenge of capturing an image of a meteor. And even better, you may already have all of the equipment on hand: tripod, DSLR or mirrorless camera, and wide angle lens.

This is the story of "Earthrise," an image that changed the world, emerging from the unlikeliest of circumstances aboard a spacecraft plagued by fogged windows.

The standard procedure for photographing a meteor shower is to photograph as wide a swath of the night sky as possible all night long. With modern digital cameras, this usually means setting a camera to shoot 15-30 second exposures at around ISO 1,600, with a 2-5 second pause between frames, resulting in a night’s haul of more than a thousand frames! While this photography can be fully automated, allowing you to sleep overnight, the real work of finding the meteors in your shots starts in the morning! We’ve cast our fishing net out, and now, it’s time to haul it back in to see what we’ve found.

Nikon has today announced that their Z 9 model has boldly gone where no Z series camera body has gone before! That's right, the Nikon Z 9 along with a selection of lenses, is off to space and I, for one, cannot wait to see the images.

When taking landscape photos, it can sometimes be helpful to put yourself into the scene to provide a sense of scale. The same is true for night photos. But the long exposure times make it hard to create sharp selfies. In this video, Alyn Wallace shows how to solve this problem.

For astrophotographers around the world who are wondering what there is to shoot in August 2023, Alyn Wallace has you covered with this in-depth guide to what's in the night sky. August is a fantastic month with the Perseid meteor shower, Milky Way core, and supermoons.

There have been some mighty impressive moon shots taken with cell phones these days, but are they even real? In the case of Samsung's Galaxy S23 Ultra, the answer is: maybe.

Two successful SpaceX missions last week, one on each coast, prompted me to review my rocket launch photo procedures, particularly since the Monday (Sept. 13) launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base was the first after a long hiatus. For those of us in southern California, it was a photo op we were eagerly awaiting since it was scheduled for after sunset.

Astrophotography can be one of the most stunning and magical genres of photography, as you watch wonders of the universe that are invisible to the naked eye appear on your camera screen. It is also one of the most technically challenging photography genres, but your practice and patience will be rewarded. If you are ready to get started, check out this fantastic video tutorial that will show you the basics of wide field astrophotography.

Deep sky astrophotography has long intrigued me. The targets that can be found in the vastness of space are nothing less than impressive. In this video by Trevor Jones of AstroBackyard, he visits the Texas Star Party and captures something incredible!

2022 departed with bad weather, and 2023 roared in with even worse weather, bringing waves of storms marching across North America. Sometimes, bad weather brings opportunities to photograph interesting atmospheric sights, but on balance, as an astrophotographer, I’d rather see clear skies!

March brings the Spring equinox, hope for improved weather, and the possibility of a marathon road trip through the sky via the Messier list of astronomical objects. Note: it’s not supposed to be a “messy” list.

We have all seen the flat earthers and other conspiracy theorists out there. Enter Dave McKeegan, who is out there, providing information on his YouTube channel to prove they are wrong and that the Earth is indeed a globe and the International Space Station does actually exist. In this video, McKeegan shows us how he captured the ISS transiting across the moon to prove them wrong.

Did you see the recent solar eclipse? It was quite a stunning sight. If you missed it, take a few minutes to watch this fantastic footage that shows the process of shooting it and the eclipse itself.

Today, Nikon has announced that it has entered into an agreement with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, yes, that NASA, to take the Z9 to another world. Literally.

Capturing the total solar eclipse is a momentous opportunity for any individual behind the lens, though it presents unique challenges and rewards. This helpful video from a professional meteorologist will show you what to expect.

Astrophotography opens a window to the cosmos, allowing photographers to capture the stunning beauty of the night sky. This niche combines the meticulousness of photography with the awe-inspiring vistas of astronomy, offering a unique blend of science and art that can mesmerize and inspire.

It's been a few days since a swath of the United States was engulfed by the solar eclipse. Internet traffic dropped drastically as everyone turned their (protected) eyes to the sky. And of course, photographers feverishly figured out how to photograph the dang thing without properly preparing. Well, most of us, anyway.