It’s the time for many of us to see and photograph the auroras. Sadly, thatt 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.
A few months ago, I shared how to take stunning night photos. There, I touched on the technical aspects of taking and editing such images. In today's article, I expand on the topic, focusing on creating perfectly noise-free night images.
For astrophotographers, there is a huge need for finding an important balance between the landscape or foreground, and the amazing interest in the sky. Whether you are photographing the Milky Way, Aurora Borealis, or the Winter Circle, the fundamentals of composition are still just as important as they are in normal landscape photography. In this video by Jeroen Linnenkamp, he provides three tips that will help you improve your compositions.
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.
PhotoPills might be the most popular app for planning photoshoots. However, there is another feature-rich app that can do even more. In this video, Alyn Wallace shows the app Planit Pro and some of its unique features.
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.
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.
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.
Astrophotography can be a tremendously fun and rewarding genre, but it takes some specialized knowledge, techniques, and often, equipment. If you are interested in capturing eye-catching photos of the night sky, check out this fantastic video tutorial that will show you everything you need to know to get started.
The night sky is a surprisingly active place, and it helps to know what is on deck for the next few weeks. If you want to enjoy a nice summer night or two with your camera, check out this fantastic video tutorial that discusses some of the most exciting astrophotography opportunities coming up in July and offers some useful for getting the most from your images.
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.
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.
The Northern Lights season has now drawn to a close. However, the next couple of seasons could be very special indeed for auroras chasers. Join me as I discuss the beauty of the Northern Lights, some of the science behind them, and how I capture this magical experience.
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!
For astrophotographers around the world who are wondering what there is to shoot in June, Alyn Wallace has you covered with this in-depth guide to what's in the night sky.
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.
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.
The northern lights are one of the great unicorns of the photography world. Researching how to find them can sound as complicated as entropy. Luckily, this video breaks down everything you need to know about analyzing the science behind hunting the auroras.
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.
I've been doing serious astrophotography for around 20 years. I started in Seattle (large mistake), but now, I'm in Arizona, where we get a lot of "severe clear" nights.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Have you ever wanted to take photos and videos of the Earth from space? Sony has launched an a7R IV nano-satellite into space, offering a user-controllable space photography service.
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.
A couple of days ago, my colleague, Ivor Rackham, had a positive review of Affinity Photo 2. What many people miss is that Affinity Photo is also an excellent astro image-processing tool.
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.
These two wide angle third-party prime lenses are both ultra-fast, with a maximum aperture of f/1.4. But which of the two should you go for?
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.
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.
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.
With long days and shorter nights, summer is a good time to consider getting into solar astrophotography. The Sun is also heading toward the active phase of its 11-year sunspot cycle and promises to make the Sun more interesting than the featureless cueball look of the sunspot cycle minimum. Solar astronomers use the count of visible sunspots as a measure of the solar activity, and sunspot cycle #25, as counted by astronomers, looks like it will be peaking sometime around 2024.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
About a month has passed since Skywatcher officially announced the Star Adventurer GTi, the smallest and lightest purpose-built GoTo astrophotography mount. But is it actually any good?
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.
If you’re at all interested in astronomy or astrophotography, there is no escaping the effects of light pollution. Whether that means traveling to darker skies or using post-processing to reduce gradients, we all kind of wish it wasn’t there. Right?
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!
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.
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.
Shooting the night sky, whether by itself or as part of a landscape, can be a magical thing. The problem is that with such low levels of ambient light, any manmade sources can quickly overwhelm the stars and ruin the frame. So, how do you deal with light pollution? This helpful video tutorial will give you some useful tips on how to avoid or mitigate it and come away with more desirable images.
