Thinking back to my first time photographing the stars, let’s be real: I had no idea what I was doing. I spent the afternoon watching video after video, and after several hours felt confident enough to attempt it. Now keep in mind I had done the research on settings, but completely skipped over the planning phase. I didn’t run into one video that talked about things like the moon phase or dark skies, some pretty important information to know when getting into astrophotography. Nonetheless, a couple friends and I headed out at eleven o’ clock at night to Death Valley. My only experience at this point with location was Death Valley and, more specifically, Badwater Basin. While I didn’t know anything about light pollution or dark skies, I was lucky enough to have a location that was free of city lights.
We arrived at about one in the morning, pulled off to the side of the road, and start walking into the desert. After wandering around in the darkness, I quickly realized that there was no way I would be able to find my car again—it was that dark, like really, really dark. Needless to say I drove two hours from my house, walked fifty feet away from my car, and shot some blurry mess of definitely not the Milky Way (I was facing due west).
If you’ve never attempted to photograph the Milky Way, you might be wondering what all these specifics have to do with photographing the night sky. Many things affect our ability to even see the Milky Way—things like moon phase, light pollution, direction, time of year, etc. Let’s get into what to look for and how to plan your Milky Way shoot.
How Do You Find the Milky Way?
Find the Right Time of Year: There is such a thing as “Milky Way Season.” We can see the Milky Way throughout the entire year; however, most astrophotographers are chasing what is called the Galactic Core (or the Milky Way Core). To be able to find and photograph this, we first and foremost have to be in the months of March through October, within the northern hemisphere. This is when the Galactic Core is visible to us. Now keep in mind you can see the Core in earlier and later months, but only for a short period of time, therefore we focus our chase on the months with the most shooting opportunities.
... Via B&H explora - All posts https://ift.tt/2eTTt8P
0 Reviews:
Post Your Review