Point your camera at the Milky Way.

What to do with your camera.

It takes patience and practice to find the right camera settings to shoot night photography. The LCD screen on your DSLR camera might make everything seem extremely bright in the dark, so use your camera’s histogram to make sure your shot is bright enough.

Focus on a bright star.

To focus on objects that are 25,000 light-years away, you can’t rely on your camera’s auto-focus. “You need to have the ability to manual focus, to set your ISO, aperture, and shutter at exactly what you want, so you need to go full manual,” Whitehouse says. One option, if your camera has it, is to use the focus magnifier feature (“Live View” on a Nikon) to pull your focus. “I find the brightest star in the sky, focus magnify on that, get it to where it’s super-crisp, and that makes the entire scene perfectly crisp,” Whitehouse says.

“It doesn’t always work perfectly the first time,” says Ohst. “So once I do that, I zoom back out, take a test shot, and then I zoom way in on the test shot to see if my stars are pinpoint. Often they’re not and I have to try it again.” Ohst recommends checking and double-checking your focus, especially if you change your camera orientation, because you might accidentally touch the focus ring and lose your shot. “And there’s no fixing that at home,” she cautions.

If you’re new to photography and you aren’t comfortable with manual mode yet, try setting your focus before the sun sets. “One trick that you can use is to focus on the thing that’s the furthest away in the landscape. Then when it gets dark, you don’t have to worry about it,” says Whitehouse.

Play with the exposure triangle.

The exposure triangle is the balance of focal length, shutter speed, and ISO that results in properly exposed photos. For best results shooting the Milky Way, use a wide-angle lens (Whitehouse recommends something between 14mm and 20mm). A shorter focal length will help you to take a longer exposure without blurring the stars. The aperture setting controls the amount of light that enters the camera, with a lower f-number allowing more light. “Some of the prime lenses that I have go down to a maximum aperture of f/1.4, which is ideal for astrophotography,” Whitehouse says.

Finally, the ISO refers to the sensitivity of the light sensor in your digital camera. Whitehouse starts with the ISO around 3,200, along with a very low aperture of f/1.8 or f/2.8, and a shutter speed set for a 30-second exposure. “If that’s too bright, I’ll pull back the ISO to a lower number and maybe cut a few seconds of exposure time,” she says. Ohst says it’s important to have a camera that can go up to a high ISO to capture as much starlight as possible.

Use technology to avoid star trails.

One of the biggest challenges in Milky Way photography is letting enough light into your camera’s sensor without creating star trails (bright streaks that show the movement of the stars over long exposures). You can avoid those by raising the ISO setting on your camera. “I shoot at ISO 6,400, 8,000, sometimes even 10,000, depending how dark it is,” says Ohst. “But when you shoot at those ISOs, the picture is really noisy. You can see pixels and they might be odd colors.” Photographers use two techniques for long exposure noise reduction: stacking and tracking.

• Stacking: To stack, you take the same photo 10 to 20 times in a row. Then you run the photos through a program like Starry Landscape Stacker for Mac and Deep Sky Stacker or Sequator for PC. The software layers the photos, one on top of the other, using an algorithm. Ohst typically uses the Median algorithm, which finds the median (middle) value of every pixel. “That way, if you have a colored pixel in there, it gets averaged out,” Ohst says.
  
  
• Tracking: “Tracking” refers to tracking the movement of the stars. To track, you put a tracker device on top of the tripod and align it to the polar axis of the sky, and it moves as the sky moves. You can take photos with longer exposures, keeping your ISO low and avoiding star trails. The drawback to tracking is that the foreground will blur. “Many people use stacking and tracking at the same time. They’ll stack only two to four images,” Ohst says, “but those exposures might be as long as four minutes.”
   

Light the foreground.

“The most compelling images of the Milky Way have a really interesting foreground,” Ohst says. But that’s difficult to achieve when you’re exposing for the night sky. “If you want to capture everything in one shot, you’re best off doing low-level lighting.” Ohst uses an LED panel that allows her to set the brightness and color temperature, or white balance. At the lowest possible setting, it’s still too bright, so she covers it with layers of white fabric.

Whitehouse will do a quick light painting of the scenery with her headlamp. “If there are mountains in the foreground, I’ll usually just try to brighten the mountains in post-processing,” she says. Ohst cautions that light painting won’t work with photo stacking because it’s hard to replicate the light over several shots. “And,” she adds, “it can really annoy other photographers who might be around.” (Whitehouse recommends using a red headlamp when changing camera settings so you don’t annoy nearby photographers.)

Experiment with photo blending.

With Adobe Photoshop, you can blend your perfect photo of the Milky Way with your perfect blue-hour photo of the foreground. It can take a lot of time to mask the horizon of one photo, especially if there are trees. “I’ve learned to avoid trees,” Ohst says.