![]() Secure your L bracket on your camera and mount the camera on the tripod in vertical position. ![]() Mount your ball head on top of the leveling base. (If you don’t have a leveling base, then level the tripod itself using a built-in or external bubble level, adjusting each leg accordingly.) Mount the leveling base on the tripod legs. Get it tightened up and as stable as possible. I prefer the Weather Underground app, but use whatever works for you. (For more on that last option, see Gabe’s write-up about his Hovenweep photo.) Or … embrace the dark. If you shoot in complete darkness, to reveal the foreground, consider Low-level Landscape Lighting, traditional light painting, or making a second run of panoramic images at a longer exposure length and perhaps a lower ISO for more quality. And the dimmer, the better-around 20 percent is ideal, give or take. ![]() So I like to choose a time when the moon is 60 to 90 degrees away from the core-i.e., a crescent. But keep in mind, you will lose the dimmest of the stars to moonlight in the atmosphere. You can make a Milky Way pano image while the moon is present. That means the four nights prior to or after the new moon.īut this poses a problem: Without moonlight, how do you illuminate the foreground?īeing an astro-landscape photographer, I want the people viewing my images to see context. To best capture the delicate features of the Milky Way in all its glory, you ideally want to shoot when the moon is not lighting the sky. But the techniques apply to our southern night photographer friends as well. Between April and August are the best months to photograph the Milky Way because of the much longer nights, but the prime of that time falls in the middle of winter (brrrr).įor the rest of this article, I will focus on the Northern Hemisphere, where I spend most of my time. In the southern hemisphere, the galactic core is visible from February to the beginning of October. In September and early October the core is setting not terribly long after twilight ends-so again, not a lot of time to shoot. (More on lens choice later.) You might even need to let the Milky Way arch out of the composition (see Chris’ Devils Tower pano above). Late sunsets = less night.Īs of August the core is too high above the horizon to create panoramas with the longer range of wide angle lenses (e.g., 35mm), so you’ll be cornered into using the superwide family-think 15mm, 14mm, 11mm. In midsummer the core is technically above the horizon longer, but there are fewer hours of darkness to shoot in. Most people don’t want to stay up that late or get up that early. In early spring the core rises very late-or early, depending on how you look at it-either way, well after midnight. But every season has disadvantages to be aware of: Common wisdom is that “prime” viewing dates are late April to late July, because that’s when the galactic center is visible for longer during the night. In the northern hemisphere, the galactic core can be photographed from the end of March to the beginning of October. And this varies a bit depending on where you live. Similarly, you can see the arch of the Milky Way any time of year-it’s just without the core during certain months.įurthermore, capturing an arch that spans from horizon to horizon, that includes the galactic core and that happens during nighttime-this all comes together during a limited window of the calendar. The galactic core is what most people want to see and shoot. You can capture the Milky Way any time of year, but capturing the galactic core-the brightest and most notable portion-happens only at certain times of the year. Let’s walk through all the steps it takes to make a Milky Way panorama happen-from planning to scouting to gear to shooting-so that you can go forth and make your own! When is the best time of year? This technique requires shooting multiple photographs, which means you’re creating a composition that will require stitching during post-processing.
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