Shooting night sky is a thrilling task. It is difficult even if there is a slight difference from your plan. Planning is an important part of creation. If you plan well, half of the job is over and what’s left is just the execution. Here are the tips to be applied during your planning for Milky Way shootout.
1. Location
As I mentioned in my previous articles, darkness is the key to get amazing images of the Milky Way galaxy. So the first preference should go to the selection of the darkest possible location within your reach. Get a light pollution map, move away from the city lights as possible as you can. Perfect darkness is what we need for a stunning capture. Choose a place with beautiful foregrounds if you plan to blend it with Milky Way later. You should be aware of the geographical aspects and politics of that particular area. You’ve to keep in mind the wild dangers awaiting in the dark. So, its better to stay prepared to alert someone when such a situation arises. I suggest you to reach the place by evening, settle everything and get a rough idea of things around you before the sunset.
2. Date
Choosing a date is as important as choosing a location. Milky Way is not visible throughout the year. There is a particular season varying on different parts of the earth. Anyways, months from April to August are considered as the best to shoot the Milky Way, as the core of our galaxy is visible during this period. But again, all the days during these months can’t be considered as the best for photographing. This is mainly due to moonlight which will ruin your picture no matter how darkest the place you’re in. So plan a New moon day, which is the perfect day as we can get rid of moonlight completely. But the days from moon phase waning crescent 16% to waxing crescent 16% are okay as well. Don’t choose days beyond that. Also, you can plan to shoot after moonset or before moonrise, just make a plan accordingly.
Tip: There is an application available for android and iOS called ‘Photopills’ which helps you to plan the date.
3. Weather
Let’s suppose that you’ve reached the darkest location possible on a new moon day. Your plans are ruined if it starts raining. So, weather is the third main factor to be considered. Milky Way photography requires a perfectly clear sky so that starlight could reach us without any restrictions. On a cloudy day, nothing would be visible. So use your weather application to predict the weather at least a day before.
If you make a plan considering all these factors, I can assure you that the success rate will reach past 90%.
Procedure
Let’s move to the main part now, shooting the Milky Way. I suggest you to follow the procedure step by step as given below.
- Take out the camera and remove all the unwanted filters in front of the lens.
- Turn the top mode dial to manual mode.
- Change the image file format to RAW.
- Use 500 rule to set the shutter speed.
- Set the aperture to its maximum value.
- Adjust ISO range (depends on your camera, keep it in between 1600 to 6400).
- Set the focusing mode to manual.
- Attach the camera to the tripod and set it in an appropriate place based on the composition.
- Zoom in to the brightest star and manually set it in the focus so that the star is now crystal sharp.
- Zoom out.
- Connect the intervalometer or use 3-sec timer to avoid shaking at the time of clicking the shutter button.
- Click the shutter button and wait until the exposure time ends.
- Zoom into the photo to read the faults. Adjust the ISO till you get the correct brightness. In case of star trails, lower the shutter speed from 3 sec to 5 sec. Keep taking test shots until it satisfies you.
- Now without moving anything or changing any settings, take 5-20 shots. We will need to stack these photos while post-processing to reduce the noise and improve the quality of the final image.
Milky Way shooting is complete on doing these 14 steps. When the raw images are ready, post-processing is the only thing left to do. So the next part will be the post-processing session and I will make a video to show the tutorial of Postprocessing of a Milky way image using Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop. Until then, settle under the night sky, shoot our galaxy and get ready with the raw images.
Further Reading :
- Part 3 – What Settings to use?
- Part 2 – What all gears?
- Part-1 – Know the gear: Astrophotography for beginners
Check out our Online Astrophotography Session by Sarath Prabhav (AASTRO-Kerala) to know more about affordable astrophotography
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