Top tips and advice
Tricks to make your astrophotography images really stand out
Foreground
If you’re trying to balance light between the foreground and the night sky, we suggest you take multiple exposures and merge the images when you edit, as you will require different settings to get the best of each. You may even find that getting your foreground shots an hour or so earlier, during the blue hour, will help, as there is more light to work with for your foreground objects. This isn’t always possible, though.
Reflections
If you’re shooting the night sky near a lake and the weather is still, there’s a great opportunity to reflect the stars in the water. There are several ways to do this, depending on the conditions. We prefer to do the hard work in the shoot, so would suggest changing your focal point to the water and taking an exposure, then setting your focus back to the night sky and taking the exact same shot. You can merge them later. You may find you need to balance your shutter speed a little here, depending on the conditions – a 20-second exposure will capture the reflection of the stars, but you may pick up movement on the water that reduces the clarity. You could try shorter exposures for your reflection shot, but may have to work harder to bring out the stars when editing. Something like Lightroom’s linear gradient edits are perfect for bringing out the clarity and sharpness of reflections.
White balance
While we’d usually recommend setting your white balance to a slightly cooler temperature for astroshots, you can experiment with either the manual white balance settings or the presets to create interesting tints and variations to your shots. If you’re getting a little light pollution, adjusting the white balance can actually make it look like a feature of the photo. We recommend cooling it right down and seeing the effect that has, although you’d need a gradient filter to reduce noise if you’re closer to an urban area.
Gradient filters
If you’ve got plenty of cash and want to try shooting near a little light pollution so you can get urban foreground images, you could consider using a graduated neutral density filter, like the 0.3, 0.6 and 0.9 landscape filters from Lee. What these allow you to do is block out some of the light at the bottom of your image. If you’re getting noise pollution from the ground upwards, applying a 0.6 filter allows you to essentially make the bottom of your image about two stops darker. It all depends on your location, and we’d always recommend shooting in dark skies for astrophotography, but it is possible to photograph stars near urban areas with the right kit and a little bit of experimentation.
If you’re shooting star trails and need to take sequences of shots, then an intervalometer is an essential accessory. However, this is quite an advanced form of astrophotography, so we wouldn’t necessarily suggest you head out to get one right away. Try to take clear pictures of stars, nebulae, star clusters and nearby galaxies before you advance to new techniques.
When planning your astrophotography shoot, there are a few things to take into consideration. It may sound obvious, but you’ll need to be in a dark-sky area to be able to capture detailed images of the night sky. Head away from urban areas and find a dark-sky location with minimal or no light pollution. There are many useful websites, like
darksitefinder.com and lightpollutionmap.info, which will help you to find a suitable location to shoot. However, if you’re planning on taking a lot of astrophotos and you want to get weather reports and guidance on where to point your camera when you shoot, the best stargazing apps are low in cost, and they’re so helpful when it comes to selecting your location and letting you know when the best time to shoot is.
The night sky is constantly changing throughout the year, and knowing what you are going to photograph is a key component of astrophotography. There are excellent apps like Stellarium and Star Walk 2 which allow you to visualise how the night sky will look at any time and date for a specific location.
“You’ll need to be in a darksky area to be able to capture detailed images”