astrophotography – In Photos dot Org

Church Bay’s Cosmic Cathedral

The Milky Way as seen from just above Church Bay, at Weaver Point, in Co. Cork. This was last night, a few minutes after the moon had set. Unfortunately, the centre of the galaxy was hidden behind a bank of clouds at the horizon. The forecast said there would be about 30% cloud, but thankfully it mostly didn’t cover most of the galaxy.

The best time to see the centre of the Milky Way again from Ireland will be in March 2026. However, you’ll still be able to shoot the less bright celestial arms once the moon has set for a good few weeks, probably.

I recommend using Sun Surveyor to plan a Milky Way shot. Photopills is good too, but the street view integration in Sun Surveyor is difficult to beat.

Aperture	ƒ/2.8
Camera	ILCE-7RM5
Focal length	24mm
ISO	6400
Shutter speed	20s

Celestial Circles

The sun was particularly active last weekend, promising spectacular aurora with KP values of over 7. Unfortunately, the expected nighttime display failed to materialise. Instead, I swung my camera around and took 10 30-second exposures of the night sky, with the trees of a nearby road.

After combining them in Photoshop this is what you get. Not bad for 300 seconds.

Star trails form circular patterns around the celestial pole due to the Earth’s rotation, and in the Northern Hemisphere, these circles are centred on Polaris, the North Star, which barely moves at all in the sky. I wasn’t sure where Polaris was, but it looks like it’s just off the photo.

Aperture	ƒ/2.8
Camera	ILCE-7RM5
Focal length	24mm
ISO	1600
Shutter speed	30s

The Milky Way in Tenerife

The Milky Way captured from inside Teide National Park.

This is a stacked image created from 19 images of the sky and 10 “noise” images. It was assembled in Sequator using this video tutorial to help me figure out how to use it. Final adjustments in Lightroom.

Getting to Teide National Park, inside a volcano, involves a long car journey going up. We were around 2300m above sea level when I took this photo, and it takes about an hour to drive here from the coast. Driving up the whole time. Quite an experience, especially after midnight. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the lights of the resorts far below which made my stomach turn briefly, but the road was simple to follow. It just kept going up and up…

I was amazed when we got there finally. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many stars. The night sky was so dark the stars lit up brightly. Unfortunately clouds rolled in as we were taking photos but this image was the first stack I made, and the cloud hadn’t become too thick yet.

Thanks Henry for the lend of the 14mm Samyang lens. It was great having that extra wide lens!

It’s clear outside!

Clear Outside is a handy Android app that will display weather information about the current location or a location of your choice.

It’s really useful for astrophotography, landscape or sunset/sunrise photography as it will display the cloud cover too. The first time I used the app was on a sunset shoot with Blarney Photography Club at Garrettstown Beach where a member of the club told us about it.

We were hoping to shoot the Milky Way later that evening but the sky was mostly covered by thick cloud. The app said that cloud would disappear by 10:30pm so after the sun set we went off to a local pub for some refreshments. I’m glad we stayed around. Later in the evening I looked out the back door and saw stars twinkling and we drove back down to the beach where we were presented with a beautiful Milky Way and a really dark sky!

Other useful Android apps to have with you are:

Golden Hour will help you plan your sunset or sunrise expeditions. Also check out Golden Hour Calculator,
The Photographer’s Ephemeris are both apps that will show you sunrise and sunset times. I only have the former as I used Amazon credits to buy it but from using TPE for desktop I can see both have similar functionality. Give both a go, you can always get a refund within the Play Store time limit.
Phototools is a useful app that I’ve used in the past to calculate the DOF (depth of field) of various lens settings but it also does more, including calculating ND filter times and sunset/sunrise times.

And further reading on astrophotography:

My friend Marcus has written a great intro to night photography you should read.
Avoid star trails using the 500 rule.
This article suggested stacking consecutive photos which I haven’t tried yet.
This is a comprehensive article on night photography. I like his suggestion on focusing. Stars are at “infinite” distance so you’d think that setting the focus at the infinity symbol would get crystal clear images but I find I have to move the focus back a little. I never thought to shoot at infinity during daytime and check where the focus marker was so I could replicate it at night.
I have a “nifty 50”. It’s the Canon 50mm f/1.8 which takes lovely sharp photos but 50mm isn’t quite wide enough for Milky Way photography. It never occurred to me that shooting a panorama using overlapping photos would produce such nice photos. The same site has a useful Milky Way exposure calculator, and an astrophotography 101 guide.
Nightscapes is a huge repository of information about night photography. I processed the Milky Way photo above with these tips in mind.
You could try exposing to the right (over exposing) but I’m not convinced that will help too much.
If you don’t have any lens filters then consider using bracketed photos to create a HDR sunset. The sunset photo above was created this way and while I think it’s a little too sharp and not perfect I still like it. I used the free Nik software to do this.

Phew. It’s raining outside, there’s been nothing but cloud for the last few days but I’ll be keeping an eye on my apps to see when it’s clear outside and I can shoot more stars!