How to Take Milky Way Photos

Milky Way over Bodie's Standard Mill

Many digital cameras these days can do surprisingly well at capturing images at night. Their sensors are more sensitive than your eyes, especially at capturing color at night.

Photography has always involved multiple steps, with exposure being only one part of the equation. In the days of film, the darkroom enabled additional influence to be applied during development, and then again during printing. Unless you were using a Polaroid camera, there was no such thing as "straight out of the camera." Maybe you trusted someone in a drug store to do your developing and printing for you, but that wasn't an optimal situation and that certainly doesn't mean that no adjustments were made. For the most part, the entire concept of "straight out of the camera" is a myth that is best set aside as soon and as thoroughly as possible.

Milky Way over Mono Lake tufa formations

Today with digital cameras your darkroom is on a computer, implemented in software. Milky Way shots are a great example of images that you won't get the most out of until you get in the habit of spending 5 minutes in your digital darkroom to complete the photographic process.

If you find a dark place outdoors to shoot and you can make out stars and the lighter, more dense band of the Milky Way, a little postprocessing can get you a lot further. As with my previous blog post you need to shoot on a tripod, using manual aperture and manual focus. Having your long exposure noise reduction turned off is not critical since we're dealing with single exposures for Milky Way shots.

Shoot with your widest focal length lens to minimize star movement in the field of view, have it opened to its widest aperture to minimize exposure time. You may still have little enough light that you shoot at the longest exposure time (generally 30 seconds) or you may need to shoot in "bulb" mode for a longer time in order to get enough light. Always shoot in RAW mode so you have far more adjustment capability in post-processing software.

Shoot near the date of a new moon, so there is as little light pollution as possible. The last thing you need to know, probably the most important thing during planning your shot, is how to predict when the most intricate, dense, bright center of the Milky Way is in the night sky! In Summer the sun is up roughly 2/3 of every day, but the Milky Way crosses the sky in the night. The center of the Milky Way is towards the constellation Sagittarius. You can look up the dates when Sagittarius is high in the sky, and that's when the Milky Way is most intense: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mjpowell/Astro/Sgr/Find-Sagittarius.htm

In simple terms, it highest around midnight around July 22, two hours later per month earlier (2am in May), two hours earlier per month later (10pm in August). So really your best shooting will be on days near the new moon dates, and preferably within 7 weeks or so of July 22.

So lets assume you go out on the right night, shoot south towards Sagittarius, capture a RAW file with some stars showing, and maybe you can barely make out the bright stripe of the Milky Way and its slightly more dense center.

Well, if you were in a darkroom... how do you lighten the Milky Way while keeping the background sky dark? The simple answer is dodge and burn... selectively darken some areas while lightening others!

In +Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (download a 30 day trial if you don't have it already, AFTER you collect some images to process) use the paintbrush tool (under the Develop module) to select and lighten the area around the Milky Way. Use the paintbrush tool to darken the sky everywhere else (this makes both the Milky Way and the stars pop).

To do even better, you can also increase contrast while performing these functions, further darkening background light levels, including noise. Adjust exposure and brightness so the fainter stars in the Milky Way get brighter while background and noise gets dark. You can increase saturation slightly on the Milky Way, but increasing contrast has that effect already, so you might not need to.

NASA satellite launch over the California Coast

Don't worry too much about how much noise your camera produces... after you adjust contrast and brightness, just crank up the noise reduction. After all, there isn't generally much detail to lose by doing that. In Lightroom for dark, noisy photos I try to max out noise reduction at 25 or maybe 30, but lately for night skies I've been going into the 60s.

Lightroom can also selectively adjust saturation and brightness of individual colors. If you shoot too close to sunset and "blue hour", or during a too-bright moon that is too full (and creating blue night sky), it can be handy to darken a blueish background sky to help separate that from the stars (just did that on a star trails shot). On the other hand for dark new moon skies, like you should have if you're planning ahead for Milky Way shooting, there is little or no light scattering turning the sky blue. A lot of the Milky Way stars have a slight blue tint though, so selectively raising brightness of blue can help separate them from dark background and any noise.

Perseid meteor shower in the Mojave Desert

It's a balancing act between white balance, adjusting individual colors, and tweaking the brightness and especially contrast of the area the Milky Way covers, but you can find a reasonable compromise pretty quickly. Once you do fairly well adjusting one shot, Lightroom enables you to copy your develop settings and apply them to additional photos.

There are other subtle considerations of course, especially for special situations such as meteor showers, but this will get you off to a great start!

---

Milky Way arch panorama

If you'd like a little extra help, I lead one night photography workshops in the Wild West "ghost town" of Bodie.  For more practice, you can join me for a longer tour of Yosemite, Death Valley or the Eastern Sierra.

In many cases I offer a visit to Bodie adjacent to one of those longer workshops, so you can shoot in Bodie to start or end your trip.

If you're looking for dark places to try night photography on your own, consider anywhere away from metropolitan areas. I identify over 300 great locations for landscape photography in my new 320-page book, "Photographing California Vol. 2 - South", pictured below.

For night photography in California, focus on locations in the Southern California desert from Anza-Borrego State Park through Joshua Tree National Park and Mojave Preserve to Death Valley National Park, or on the Eastern Sierra region.

I offer author-signed copies on my Web site: www.JeffSullivanPhotography.com

How To Create Star Trails Photos

Yosemite Star Trail Reflection, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

The Basics

With today's digital cameras it is surprisingly easy to create star trails images. At the highest level, all you do is run a sequence of night star shots through a star trails program and enjoy the result. As is often the case, the challenges come in the details.

You'll need to capture images covering 30 to 60 minutes or more. A sturdy tripod is essential. You can trigger exposures manually, but that's tedious and not fun to do for an hour at night. Ideally you'll have a remote trigger that can lock down to fire off sequential shots, or even better, an intervalometer which takes shots at certain intervals which you define.

You'll need to focus your lens on an object at close to infinity, and leave the focus mode set to manual so it won't hunt for focus in the dark. The focus ring of your lens probably continues past that point to compensate for differences as temperatures fluctuate, so focus during daylight on a distant object and note where this is, or if your lens has continuous focus ring with no visible scale, focus your camera during the day, switch it into manual, and carefully tape the focus ring with removable painter's masking tape or gaffer's tape.

You'll want to take sequential shots close together so the star trails to be continuous, so turn off your camera's long exposure noise reduction.

You'll also want a consistent exposure, so use your camera in Manual exposure mode.  Cameras have slightly different sensitivity to light, and the moon brightness (phase) and local light pollution can affect your exposure from night to night, so you'll need to run some tests to determine what settings to use for your individual shots.

Full moon exposure: 15 seconds f/4, ISO 3200

Under a bright full moon in clear skies I might start at f/4 at ISO 3200 for 15 seconds. If you'd prefer to drop your ISO to 1600, simple double the shutter speed for the same overall exposure.  On a darker night you can choose a wider aperture, higher ISO, or increase your exposure time using an external intervalometer.  Take lighter and darker shots to ensure that you've identified an exposure which isn't too bright or too dark, then set up your camera to capture a sequence of images at the optimal settings.  The main exposure of 15 seconds enables me to quickly use Automatic Exposure Bracketing to take lighter and darker exposures at 30 and 8 seconds to verify the best exposure setting, then I can pick an equivalent exposure at the camera's longest internally available setting (currently 30 seconds on most cameras).

Once you have the basic exposure figured out, take that exposure over and over until you reach 30 to 45 minutes or more total. Leave as little time as possible between shots.

For this example I used about 80 shots of 30 seconds each, covering 40 minutes. I used the free StarStaX software (www.StarStaX.net) in "lighten" mode, where the lightest pixels are kept as images are merged, creating the trails as the stars move from frame to frame.

Intermediate Considerations

In very long exposures, digital camera sensors can produce random spots of bright single pixels referred to as "hot pixels".  If you're shooting on a relatively warm night, about 60 to 70 degrees or warmer, with many cameras you may start to see more hot pixels the warmer it gets.  StarStax can help you eliminate them.  At the end of your star trails sequence, put your lens cap on and take a few more images of the all-black capped lens at the same settings you've been using.  The only data in the image should be the hot pixels.  StarStaX allows you to identify these images so it can automatically eliminate those hot pixels.

Yosemite is under a major flight path for airplanes

In the old film days, star trails were accomplished by leaving a camera shutter open for one long exposure, even for many hours.  Some purists believe that everything should be captured in one exposure.  Since the photographic industry honors the achievements and traditions established over many decades, photographers who learned on film still dominate the industry in many ways.  Change is slow.  So you might consider a preference for long-held film best practices to be "traditionalist" thinking as well.  There's nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but it's not inherently right or better either, it's just a particular bias that people are welcome to hold if they like.  Unfortunately, few places these days are so unpopulated and uncrowded that you can completely avoid interruptions such as passing headlights or other photographers' flashlights.  So in many cases a single long exposure is likely to be interrupted by a wide range of lights, from airplanes passing overhead to cars or nearby flashlights.  A general approach to be able to edit these out is to capture many exposures, and edit them out frame by frame.

When editing airplane trails out of a starry sky, it is easiest to edit out short ones.  Local light pollution on your foreground, or on a distant road, can be quickly and easily taken out as described below, provided that you have enough exposures to provide images with those areas not polluted with lights.

Advanced Considerations

Darken mode

Unfortunately in Yosemite Valley, the cars driving by create lasting light trails, and headlights spill onto nearby landscape features as well, making them harder to manually edit out than narrow, linear airplane trails. To remove this sort of broad local light pollution, there's also a "darken" mode in StarStaX, which keeps the darkest pixels in the sequence of images that you send it, eliminating the effects and trails of the car headlights.

This also eliminates the star trails, but by using layers in Photoshop and blending that center portion of the darkened sequence into the lightened star trails sequence to get a star trails image without the car lights.

Once you decide to use separate images, you might question whether or not to use 30 second exposures, since that tends to also require high ISO, which many photographers associate with noise, or and very wide apertures, which many photographers associate with lower depth of field and/or softness in focus.  These are valid considerations and if you have an intervalometer that can handle multiple minute exposures, there's no harm in testing different approaches.  But the image stacking process in StarStaX eliminates most noise, so ISO isn't as much of a concern as many photographers tend to assume (at least not for noise).

One sequence of 30-second images

Consider also that you are not nocturnal, and you're far more likely to make mistakes late at night, so do you really want to complicate a process that you'll enter into when somewhat mentally impaired?  You can set up everything when you're alert during the day or evening, then start the image capture later.  I've done that, then started the intervalometers that I had programmed on two cameras for night shooting, only to find the next morning  that I had 1200 exposures of the lens caps that I had neglected to take off.  There's a lot to be said for an easy, repeatable, and infinitely simple process with maximum applicability across as many situations as possible!  I can set 30 seconds in camera, I can have a one second interval between shots.  Done.  It's hard to mess that up.

On some external intervalometers I can lock the shutter release button down to have zero seconds between shots if the camera is set to continuous shooting mode, but there are two new variables introduced, the shooting mode and the intervalometer's features, which will eventually cause problems on a different combinations camera and intervalometer.  Keep it simple, or pursue every last setting for ultimate quality if you wish, but understand that increasing complexity will increase your failure rate.  Time and travel expenses are often the most valuable commodities for a landscape photographer, and long exposures and our desire to sleep make night shooting time even more precious.  How many opportunities do you want to miss, when your itinerary doesn't allow staying an extra night to re-take a shot?

There are other subtle considerations on the capture, post-processing, and output/printing portions of the process, but this will get you off to a great start.

So start simple, and gradually try more ambitious shots or more complicated techniques as you like, but go give star trails a try!

---

Join us to learn night photography in Bodie!

If you want a little extra help, I lead one night photography workshops in the Wild West "ghost town" of Bodie.  For more practice, you can join me for a longer tour of Yosemite, Death Valley or the Eastern Sierra.

In many cases I offer a visit to Bodie adjacent to one of those longer workshops, so you can shoot in Bodie to start or end your trip.

If you're looking for dark places to try night photography on your own, consider anywhere away from metropolitan areas. I identify over 300 great locations for landscape photography in my new 320-page book, "Photographing California Vol. 2 - South", pictured below.

For night photography in California, focus on locations in the Southern California desert from Anza-Borrego State Park through Joshua Tree National Park and Mojave Preserve to Death Valley National Park, or on the Eastern Sierra region.

I offer author-signed copies on my Web site: www.JeffSullivanPhotography.com