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Night Photography

Win one of two free Fstoppers' tutorials with your best image taken in the night.
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1.75 - "Needs Work" 

My first attempt at a night sky composite. There was a lot of noise, and lightroom got rid of a lot of the detail, but I thought I'd still submit it.

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5 Comments

what lens and settings did you use? you need a really long exposure, could be a couple min for the foreground. And better to stack 6-8 clicks of the sky to improve SNR

How do you do a stack to reduce the SNR? Could you send me a link to a tutorial.

There are many tutorials online using Photoshop, but dedicated stacking programs like Sequator for PC (free!) or StarryLandscape Stacker for Mac $30? is the easiest way, and they can also remove satellites and plate trails from the image : )

I use a program called Astro Pixel Processor, its $150 but much more specialized for Deep Sky Astrophotography which is what I mostly do.

Also you don't even need a tracker to stack 6-10 exposures, but will need to crop a little at the end. And if stacking 6-10 frames, you can use a slightly shorter exposure to get better star shapes, like divide focal length by 400 instead of 500

Thank you! I will try this out!