The Wild Photographer

A Simple Formula for Great Astrophotography

• Court Whelan • Episode 77

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0:00 | 24:36

In this snapshot episode of The Wild Photographer, Court shares a quick, practical guide to astrophotography — specifically, how to photograph the Milky Way with strong composition, sharp stars, and a plan for success.

Astrophotography can feel intimidating at first. You’re working in extreme low light, trying to make tiny points of starlight stand out in a big, dramatic way. Plus, you're likely using gear that is specialized, and let's face it, things are more challenging in the pitch dark.

But the good news is that with a solid plan, it's a fairly straightforward formula. With the right lens, a sturdy tripod, thoughtful foreground composition, and a few repeatable camera settings, you can create beautiful night sky images that will really help elevate your nature photography.

Links Mentioned in the Episode:

Sun Surveyor App
A planning app for tracking the sun, moon, and Milky Way, including augmented reality tools for scouting compositions.
https://www.sunsurveyor.com/

Timeanddate Moonrise and Moonset Calculator
Useful for checking moonrise, moonset, moon phase, moon direction, and timing for astrophotography planning.
https://www.timeanddate.com/moon/

Court Whelan on YouTube
Court’s YouTube channel includes photography tutorials, editing walkthroughs, and visual companions to topics discussed on the podcast.
https://www.youtube.com/@courtwhelan

Smallrig LED Light: https://amzn.to/3PlZvTT

Petzl Actik headlamp: https://amzn.to/4nUlwWE

Court's Websites

Sponsors and Promo Codes:


Court Whelan (00:00)
Hey friends, welcome back to the wild photographer and welcome to my snapshot series. These are shorter episodes designed to address very specific topics in a kind of brief, direct sort of way. I'm always quite direct in my podcast. but nevertheless, these are even more to the point.

Today we're talking about astrophotography and really a quick, simple guide, simple formula for great astrophotography. Let's go ahead and dive right into it. So first of all, let's talk about gear, the gear that you want and need for astrophotography. It is a demanding type of photography because it is extremely low light and you're trying to essentially make stars, which are very, very small pinpoints of light, stand out in a big, amazing way.

So first off, you need a very fast and a very wide lens. And what does it mean by fast? Well, fast really just comes down to the aperture rating. And so every lens has some sort of aperture rating. Many of them are variable, might be F 4.5 to 6.3, which means that as you zoom in, it gets narrower and narrower as far as the

and bigger F number. But for wide angles, especially astrophotography lenses,

We're talking about things like F 2.8 and really ideally kind of necessarily F 1.4. These are high end lenses. These are luxury lenses. But the great thing about the mirrorless age is that they are getting smaller and more inexpensive. So you can now pick up 16 millimeter lenses that are F 2.8 that are F 1.4 that aren't going to absolutely break the bank. But I will encourage you if you want to really get into astrophotography.

F is kind of the gold standard. is what I use. I have a 20 millimeter F 1.4. So that's fast. The next thing is wide, almost ultra wide ideally. So wide angle is generally something around 24 millimeters, maybe 28 millimeters, but I like to go even wider. In fact, another gold standard for astrophotography is that 14 or 16 millimeter class of lenses. For me, I shoot on a 20 millimeter.

It's kind of the best of both worlds because it actually makes the foreground elements, which we'll get to as a very, very important facet, a little bit bigger in the scene. ⁓ 14 millimeters are great, but that means everything in front of you is going to be hyper, hyper small. So 20 millimeters, works great for me, but 14 is also fantastic. But I think once you go to the 24 millimeters and 28 and even 35 millimeters, which all have lenses that are around 1.4 aperture.

you start to get restricted because you can't show as much sky in the shot. And that's the whole goal is a good bit of foreground and a whole lot of sky.

also want a DSLR or a mirrorless. I don't want to say that point and shoots won't work, but what I've often found is that you cannot go on full manual mode with a relatively high ISO with point and shoots like the Canon PowerShot series. For instance, it'll let you go manual, but it'll top out when you're at that 15, 20, 25 second exposure.

It'll top out at ISO 80 or 100, which is not going to cut it.

ideally in today's day and age, ⁓ a mirrorless camera is

all the R and D is going into. So it's going to give you the best sensor, the latest sensor and the best low light capabilities.

Next up, you need a tripod. This is a must. There's no negotiating here. We're going to be at, as you'll see in the settings section coming up at something like 15 second exposures. You a hundred percent cannot handhold that.

And when thinking about a tripod, you can certainly start out astrophotography with any old tripod. can start out with smaller Gorilla pods and travel tripods. But the ultimate thing, the thing you really want to aim for is something that is really, really sturdy. If you go for a lightweight travel tripod, you're going to end up having to spend more money for that stability. But stability, weight, kind of heft to the tripod makes astrophotography a whole lot easier because the camera can have absolutely no movement.

And since we're photographing outside, means that if the wind is blowing, even a small breeze that might sway your tripod just enough. So I really can't overstate the need to have a really rock solid tripod. But again, you can invest the money as you get into it, as you start to love it. Starting with the tripod at any level is going to be really, really key for great astrophotography.

OK, the final part of the gear section, this is more of a bonus. If you have access to or wish to purchase a red headlamp, they can be really big game changers. So when you're out doing astrophotography, you really want to let your eyes adjust to the darkness. This is going to help you see the stars better, figure out composition, figure out where the Milky Way is and honestly just enjoy the experience more because when you're seeing what you're photographing and seeing the beautiful Milky Way in the stars.

It's just a lot more fun to be out there. And as you'll probably come to find being out there for a good bit of time, 30 minutes or an hour is really a must to get a variety of shots and make sure you get at least one that is pretty exceptional.

red headlamps are pretty ubiquitous these days. I have a Petzl active headlamp, it's rechargeable, it's got a nice bright white light, so when I'm walking on the trail to the photographic viewpoint or where I'm gonna set up my scene, I can navigate.

When you put the red light on, means that you are preserving your night vision as you fuddle with camera settings.

Okay, next thing to set up, and I will say quick caveat, it is a huge benefit to do some location scouting during the daytime. Setting up from scratch at night is challenging. I don't wanna say you can't do it, I do it often, but if you wanna get a next level shot, if you wanna stack the deck in your favor, doing a little bit of scouting during the daylight is really helpful. And an app that I've found that is a game changer for my astrophotography is called the Sun Surveyor app. I'll put the link in the description.

but it allows you to scrub the time of day

uses augmented reality to track the Milky Way across the sky. Because ultimately with astrophotography, we should really, in my mind, be calling it Milky Way photography because that's where the real color, the real star light comes out. It's just the thing you want to photograph when doing astrophotography, if at all possible.

So the Sun Surveyor app is a great way to go out during the day.

figure out where in the sky it's going to be at, let's say at 9 p.m., 10 p.m. So you can set up your shot and start looking for, this is the key thing, foreground elements, very interesting, beautiful foreground elements. This is not the time to tell you each and every opportunity. There are dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of possibilities out there in nature. But I personally love to have big scraggly trees. I like to have that texture. I'm OK with it being silhouetted. I'm not looking for ambient light.

It's fine if it's just a completely silhouetted scraggly tree or heck even Bush. But one thing that I've noticed is that you do need something relatively high in the sky. So things like wildflowers or boulders that are on the hiking trail, they're really just not enough. That being said, if you're just starting out with astrophotography, any foreground element is going to help you get great shots. And it's really going to help you learn and figure out what you like to include in your foreground shots

The key thing here is that just shooting the stars really isn't going to be enough in my opinion. You need to have something in the foreground to create some context, some intrigue. If you're just aiming the camera straight up in the sky, yes, it's still kind of cool, but it's going to be several levels below where you could be at if you've got something really cool in the foreground. Heck, it could even be a person. It could be a camper van. It could be your tent. There's really no end to possibilities out there.

The other thing with foreground is you want to make sure it's far enough away from you, but not so far that it's only the bottom hundredth of the scene. So this is where it takes some practice. You're probably not going to get it perfect the very first time you do this, but I generally think that if I'm shooting at F 1.4, you may know that's a very, very shallow depth of field, but with a 20 millimeter lens, you have some leeway. I'm usually aiming for that foreground element to be something like 20, 30 feet away if I can get away with it.

And the reason is, is that's far enough that you can get the tree or whatever that foreground is in focus and the stars in focus at F 1.4. If you're right underneath a tree or right underneath a cactus and you're like mere feet away and you focus in that cactus, you'll find that the stars are likely out of focus at F 1.4. Conversely, if you focus on the stars, you'll find that even if it's silhouetted, the margins of that foreground element, the tree, the cactus, the whatever are just slightly blurred and it's,

It doesn't botch the photo like it would in many, other cases, but it is distracting and it's really not the ideal. So again, 20 ish feet away is kind of a sweet spot for me, but this is where practice makes perfect.

And I mentioned tripod as a piece of gear, but yeah, you got to set up your tripod. You want to consider the height of your tripod. You want to consider the angle of it, et cetera, et cetera. But you want to set up your tripod. Sometimes what I do when I'm location scouting during the day, actually is I'll set up my tripod in the place that I want. So that way when I am, you know, you have to think about crowds and visitation and other people in the trails. But if I'm in a really remote wilderness setting, if I'm backpacking and, there's only a handful of other people around or nobody around.

then I'll just go right back to my tripod. I don't have to location scout anymore, pop the camera on it and boom, I'm ready. And the camera's even angled in position because I've done a few test shots of that foreground element of the bright sky, obviously. And that way I know, okay, I don't have to adjust really much more and I'm dialed in and ready to go.

Okay, so let's get into settings. This is the piece de resistance. This is really important stuff. So you may notice one thing that I skipped or maybe missed in your opinion from the gear section and that is a remote shutter. I personally don't use remote shutters very often. Instead, I use a two second timer on my camera and I found that this actually works really darn well and it's one less piece of gear to fuddle with.

It's one less setting I have to change because setting up a remote shutter can sometimes be cumbersome if you're not doing it day in and day out. You got to go to a different part of your camera and turn Bluetooth on and connect and make sure it all works. So yeah, I just use the two second timer kind of like the self timer. Usually most cameras have a two and a 10 second timer. A two second timer allows you to press that shutter button and the camera stabilizes. It doesn't move. So there's no camera wiggle when the shutter is actually open taking the shot.

Next up, the really simple but sort of difficult part are the actual settings. So again, I go on full manual mode. That means manual shutter speed, manual aperture, and manual ISO. And I dial in these three settings for my f1.4 lens each and every time. It's a 15 second exposure. It is f1.4 and it is ISO 400. So if you do not have a 1.4 lens and you're shooting at an f2.8 lens, I've got

not so great news for you is that you're gonna have to quadruple your ISO to get the same exposure because going from 1.4 to 2 cuts your light in half, going from 2 to 2.8 cuts your light in half. So even though you might be shooting with a f2.8 lens, which is a very, very fast lens by conventional standards, you're losing

an f1.4, is another reason why I love those super, super fast low f number lenses.

You'll also notice on these settings when the raw photo, yeah, quick caveat there, make sure you're shooting on raw because we are going to edit these photos. We'll get to the editing section in just a bit, but you're going to notice that the raw photo coming out of the camera is really quite dark. And that's fine. You you could go to a 20 second exposure.

could go to a 25 second exposure and that will increase light. But I found that a, I'm kind of impatient because I want to take a lot of shots and a little bit of time. And so even saving that five or 10 seconds,

really helps with my, my, my patients, my, little patient angel sitting on my shoulder. So 15 seconds is going to make it relatively dark, but here's the, here's the crux is that shooting on ISO 400 is a relatively low ISO. So you can do a lot of editing, some pretty dramatic editing and not get noise in your shot. So again, you can go for a longer exposure. That's a okay, but I've found that 15 seconds with a slightly darker shot.

and then boosting it in the editing process, which we'll get to in a second is really a sweet spot for me.

next thing is setting your white balance. So if you're taking single photos and you're just trying to make a single image, it's not as important to set it in camera. But if you are doing time lapses or star lapses, it is ultra important to not be on auto because auto is going to change that white balance from shot to shot. Even just small bits of ambient light, like a car driving in the distance, it could.

trigger a little bit of difference there. So my rule of thumb is I always set a custom white balance for astrophotography and it is quite cool. So you might notice a lot of astrophotography shots out there that look a little bit yellow. You might notice a lot that look quite blue. That spectrum, the white balance spectrum of blue to yellow is just the, that's the whole thing with white balance. But I found my favorite type of astrophotography is a cool blue look that kind of brings out some of the violets and the pinks and the purples of the Milky way.

To each his own, you could set it on a warmer, but I do go for 3500 Kelvin in the custom setting of my white balance in my camera.

But again, great thing about shooting in RAW is you can change this as many times as you want in the post-processing process, and ⁓ it doesn't degrade the photo. So you can choose your white balance after, but almost always I'm going for, even in the editing post-processing process, I'm going for something around 3500 Kelvin.

Okay, a really important one, where and how to focus. This is usually the bane of most astrophotographers' existence, especially those that are just starting out. Do you focus in the stars? How do you focus in the stars? Do you focus in the foreground? What's the best? Well, I've found that in general you wanna focus in the stars because if you do focus in the foreground, even with that tree or whatever, 20, 30 feet away, there might be just a slight difference and if those stars are out of focus, it's-

pretty easy to notice. So here's my formula for focusing on the stars is I will put my camera in manual focus mode. I will try to find a star through the viewfinder and I will zoom in using the little magnifying glass two times. So usually the first zoom in is like a five times picture and then the second is a ten or fifteen times. And the key thing is you want to find a star out there. It might just be one star that's a-okay. You don't need many of them.

and you're gonna rotate your manual focus ring until that star gets to be the smallest pinpoint possible. So oftentimes it'll start off as a bit of a haloed diffuse light, white pinpointed light. And as you rotate that ring, that halo or that light coming off the star will get bigger or it'll get smaller. The smaller you can make that star, the better. And really you wanna stop touching the focus dial

as soon as that star is at its smallest form. And that's when the stars are in perfect focus. And then do not touch your focus ring anymore for that single shot. You will probably need to adjust it for subsequent shots. If you move your camera or change composition, just small fractions of an inch, even fractions of a millimeter changes in that focusing ring, just by some jostling could send it out a whack. So it's really important that you keep focusing each and every time.

The other option, since we're talking about options out there, is to focus on the foreground element in front of you. And this is a much easier way. And I like this for Northern Lights photography. I don't really use it for Astro because again, the stars are way more distant and you can tell if they're not sharp. this again, alternative option B or maybe even option C really in my book is to take your headlamp, the white part of the headlamp, shine it on the tree or whatever that element, whatever that foreground element is.

and then use your autofocus, pinpoint autofocus on the tree, try to go for like the margin of the tree. If you have the center point autofocus, it picks up that contrast of light and dark better, and then switch your lens to manual. And that way it locks in focus in that tree, so you can take shots in the location, that specific location where your tripod's pointed a few times before you need to readjust. But again, this is not my default option.

And then the rest of the shoot comes down to experimentation. ⁓ You've done all this prep work, you've done all the setup, you've changed your camera settings. It's time to experiment. Like I said,

I like to be out there as long as I can. So I'm going to be taking multiple shots, different compositions. I'm going to shoot landscape oriented one shot and then portrait oriented another shot. I do a lot of experimentation and don't forget as you're experimenting with different compositions, you really want to be very mindful of refocusing each and every time because as you change the camera, even if you are mindful not to touch the focusing dial, it might have jostled a little bit and

You just got to rerack focus almost every single time.

The other thing you can experiment with ⁓ is a longer exposure. Like I said, I really like 15 seconds. It's a good sweet spot for me. ⁓ It's a little bit shorter than the absolute extent. But the thing is, is if you shoot for longer than 25 seconds, you're very likely to have some movement in the earth. Yes, believe it or not, the earth moves fast enough that it could create little wormies in the sky, such that the stars are actually blurred because of the rotation. So there's this rule called the 500 rule. If you divide 500 by your focal length,

that gives you a rough approximation of what the longest exposure could be for you. And you might start thinking like if you're shooting on a 14 millimeter, like this actually gets longer than 25 seconds. But in general, I do not shoot longer than 25 because of the blur. I'm very, mindful of that. But my sweet spot, 15.

Another topic you might be thinking about is do you willfully inject artificial light? Do you set up a little light box? Do you do light painting?

with all that. It's fun. Light painting is really cool. It's just taking a flashlight for a very, very brief amount of time and painting it on part of the tree to bring a little bit of light in the scene. You only need to do it for like a second or two, and that brings enough light that you can actually start to see the tree.

but I find it to be very challenging. I find it to be relatively artificial. And what happens is usually your light, cause it's a bright white or like a bluish white light, is it just, it looks kind of botched. It looks like you did it. So if you are into light painting, if you want to inject some ambient light in your scene, one is, you know, this is a benefit of actually photographing around lodges and camps is just like that diffuse glow from the inside of a tent.

Behind you might be enough light to sort of illuminate your foreground element.

a very small ⁓ little LED light panel that's made by SmallRig and you can actually set the color temperature so I can make it a really warm yellow light or heck even like a red light or a purple light. I can do some really creative things and I just put it on a small tripod quite a ways away from the foreground element. Remember it's the foreground element we're really trying to light up.

And I find it can be quite nice. My one bit of advice here is do less light than you think. You'll quickly learn if it's too much light. And also think about angled light. Don't put it on your camera. Don't put it behind you. Put it off to the side, maybe like 45 degrees or truly 90 degrees, like just to the left of your subject and have it an angled light. Cause that really brings out some of the intrigue in the shadows. But ultimately I don't personally use a lot of that with my astrophotography.

And the final thing is editing. with editing nighttime photos with astrophotography, there are a few things that I gravitate right off the bat. The first thing is increasing the whites. So in Photoshop, Camera Raw, Lightroom, there's a white slider and that is going to be your biggest friend. You might think exposure right off the bat and trust me, exposure is important too, but whites really gets the white light of the stars to pop and shine that brings those stars out.

Whereas if you use the exposure slider first, it's going to light everything up, including the dark night sky. And you might want to touch the exposure slider a little bit, like maybe five or 10 points in the brightness direction. But it's really whites that I'm going to crank up and experiment with and do quite a bit of.

The other thing that I'm going to do is probably mess with the D Hayes slider or at least the blacks slider. D Hayes is kind of like an advanced meta slider that really adjusts the mid tones of the blacks. And it's great. ⁓

You can quickly overdo it, but I think it brings a lot of richness in the sky. So dehaze is something really, really nice. You can, if you think of it and want to get a little bit fancier, you can do a mask in Lightroom or Camera Raw where you select only the sky to edit. And I think that's nice as well. Usually it's not a problem because the foreground is usually quite small. It's a small sliver of the bottom of your frame. And there's not a lot of light in the foreground anyway. So increasing the whites.

that also adjusts the foreground, not just the sky, but also the foreground isn't a wrong thing to do. You're probably gonna notice very little difference between the two, but that is one way to be a little bit fancier is to just select and mask the sky and do all of your treatments there. The final thing is I'm going to probably adjust saturation and or vibrance. So vibrance is a smart saturation slider and it doesn't really affect the greens and the oranges as much.

So vibrance is pretty good for night skies because you know, you're probably not going to have a lot of greens and oranges in your scene. But really what I'm trying to do is make this sky look bodacious, like look really vibrant and look really cool. You can definitely over saturate just like you can in any photography. But ultimately I do just use a saturation and or the vibrance to boost the colors because you'll be surprised how much magenta and orange and blue is coming from the Milky Way.

And I think saturating a little bit with judicial and to your own taste is a really, really good thing to do as well.

The final thing I'll mention is where to do astrophotography. So obviously anywhere there's dark skies, there are a lot of national parks to the west, there are a lot of high altitude places around the world and in the US that you can do great astrophotography because it is dark, it's away from light pollution, but most importantly, it's dry and it's up there. It's like thousands of feet in elevation.

And that's probably the most unknown special feature of certain places that get these dark sky ratings is that you have to have elevation and dryness to really make the stars come out. The issue is that when you are at lower elevations, you're oftentimes cutting through more humidity, especially if you're in like tropical islands. You think, well, gosh, there's not a light source for miles, if not hundreds of miles. But sometimes that humidity

will actually affect it so that you can't see it. And if you can't see the Milky Way, of course, the camera can't see it.

Court Whelan | The Wild Pho... (22:07)
When we're talking about when to do great astrophotography, it comes down to obviously dark skies and the the where, but the the time of the moon cycle, and then also in the time of the year. These are all relatively important things. So first off, the time in the year. Generally people will agree that the April to October time of year is really best. This is when

The cosmic forces aligned to to get the Milky Way most pronounced. I I cannot explain all the astrophysics behind it, but it's a pretty known thing, and I've seen this ⁓ visually as well,

So April through October is kind of the the key thing. ⁓ but then the other part is the moon phase. And it's pretty obvious to think, well, you want to go out during a new moon because that means that the light from the moon is not radiating across the sky. If you if you have a bright sky from the moon, it's gonna be just that much harder to see the Milky Way, if not impossible. But I will give you some good news is that it's not only about a new moon.

If you go to ⁓ like timeanddate.com, I'll put a link in the notes here, and you look at the moon rise and moonset calendar, you'll notice that for one to two weeks a month, that moon rise is so late in the night that you're basically getting the benefits of a new moon without it actually being a new moon. So don't distress, you don't only have to go out on the handful of nights where the moon is virtually non-existent. It's really just about when in the night it rises and sets.

And again, I was just photographing in Namibia and we did not have a new moon, but I was getting great shots even in like a quarter moon or a half moon because the time in the month was such that it didn't rise in the sky until like one or two AM. So I was able to get those after dark, after sunset times of night with great astro, great Milky Way opportunities.

Court Whelan (23:55)
And there you go. Quick snapshot. That's a simple formula for great astrophotography. The only thing left to do is rinse and repeat and keep on having a lot of fun out there.

Before I go, I wanted to turn you on to my latest project, which is developing and building out my YouTube channel. I'm doing a lot of editing tutorials and a lot of photography tutorials on YouTube. You may be watching this on YouTube itself, but it's a really great resource for me to show visually some of the things I talk about in this podcast.

So I definitely recommend checking out my YouTube channel. Subscribing would help me out tremendously. And you can do that at youtube.com slash at court whelan And I'll put the link in the description. So once again, thanks so much for tuning in and talk to you next time.


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Court Whelan

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