I once read an article that said when Los Angeles was hit with a massive power outage in 1994, residents called 911 to report strange gases glowing in the sky*! What they were seeing was the milky way indeed! It hit me then, if you have lived in a large city all your life and have not had the chance to go explore outdoors in an absolutely dark environment, what will be your impression of the Milky Way? I guess pretty similar to what happened to the people in LA in 1994.
*https://timeline.com/los-angeles-light-pollution-ebd60d5acd43
When it comes to the milky way photography, there are a few things that I need to mention. First, stars are not very bright. Their brightness level is 1/100th to 1/1000th of a full-moon brightness. Our eyes use cones to see during the day (when it is too bright) and use rods to see during nights (when it is too dark). Cones are very sensitive to colors while rods mostly help us see as black and white. Thus, at nights, we do not see a specific color for stars since they are too dim. When we use a camera to take a photo of stars, we generally make the sensor collect light for a long time, i.e., 20 seconds. What this means is that a camera can add up all the emitted light by stars (called integration). But our eyes are not integrators, they see spontaneously. This results in a camera recording a surprisingly bright image that you will never see with your eyes. Second, postprocessing that happens on the photos is able to bring out more detail out of the photo than the un-edited photos show us. The fact that we cannot see the milky way with our eyes as vividly as cameras makes it hard for us to know how much editing has been done on a photo. So, when we see a heavily edited version of the milky way, we get overjoyed and shocked, and also appreciative of the photographer’s amazing work. In general, we as humans, like surprises! On my website, I have milky way photos that I have not edited much, have edited a bit, or edited a little more than I generally do. The milky way photos that I have edited the most are the photos that I have taken with a lens with a long focal length, since these lenses give us an incredible close-up view of the Milky Way, like a telescope. The easiest metric to know if a photo is edited heavily or not is to look at the photo’s histogram. If the balance between yellow and blue, and magenta and tint is not correct, it means that white will not look white on that image. So, that photo is edited with an artistic flavor.
Eta Aquariids meteor shower as seen from the Figueroa mountain, CA. The milky way core can easily be seen in the photo. Some of the stars look bloomed out. This was mainly because of the low clouds that you can see at the bottom left of the image that stretched all the way to the bottom right. I was very worried about these clouds when I examined the sky around 10 pm, but the sky got pretty clear around 1 am with only some clouds stretching across. And then the show began. Shooting stars crossing the night sky right before my eyes. A stunning show complemented by the Milky Way core in mid May. I think I saw 12 shooting stars that night with naked eyes. The most I had ever seen in my life!
Planet conjunction seen from the top of the La Cumbre peak in CA. Not only these five planets were aligned, but also the moon tried to get in between the planets, causing a multi-body planetary parade that will not happen for another 30 years! Santa Barbara is covered in a thick fog and the famous Channel Islands are seen at the very far (bottom right of the photo). I hope I am alive when this show happens again in 30 years.
A 360-degree panorama of the Milky Way, flattened out as a single image. I had hard time uploading this image because this 300-mega-pixel panorama was around 1 GB. So, I had to downgrade the file quality by a lot which unfortunately severely impacted the photo’s dynamic range. Yet, this photo always haunts me, because it was the first 360-degree panorama that I took of the Milky Way. I camped at the Texas Springs campground in the Death Valley and woke up around 3 AM to go and take this shot. It was cold (mid March) but so beautiful. I waited for the moon to set, which was so magical (I wish I had another camera to capture the moonset). The bottom right of the image is actually where the moon set (geographical west). And I had about an hour to take my shots before astronomical twilight kicks in. I went up a hill, set up my camera, and took shots one by one, and here it is, the Milky Way in the middle of the desert with patches of clouds, beautiful Hydrogen Alpha emission seen as the red tint all across the sky, Venus rising, moon setting on the west, and the sun which will rise in an hour (an educated observation from the bright yellow tint on the East, close to Venus). A camper had their light on to study at 4 AM and a car driving on the road next to the Ranch at Death Valley hotel are proofs that you are never alone! Surreal!
Milky Way seen on Mars, but man-made light pollution does not give up the skies even on Mars!!
I was kidding. This is not Mars, this is Trona Pinnacles, a very mystic place with lots of tufas around that seem like they don’t belong to their surroundings. I never thought of visiting this place for an astrophotography opportunity, but thanks to my buddy, I made it there. The majestic Milky Way, with its magenta-colored Cygnus region, arching above the pinnacles is a spectacle to behold. And unfortunately, light pollution on the bottom right of the photo, as the green tint, is another indication that we are losing our dark skies at an unprecedented rate.
My goodness! This photo had me thinking for days. I was trying to take a panorama of the Milky Way at Trona Pinnacles but time got tight and half way through the shots, the astronomical twilight kicked in. Basically, when astronomical twilight kicks in, sky is too bright for an astrophoto and only the brightest of stars can be observed. when this happened, I got so frustrated but still kept capturing my photo sequence. When I stitched the photos together to make my panorama, I saw this beautiful color transition from red to blue that I had never seen before. The moral of the story is to never give up and trust the process!
Milky way panorama, with Lyrids meteor shower superimposed on top of it, at Santa Margarita lake, CA. Lyrids is one of the weakest meteor showers of the year and I think at the peak, there will be around 20 meteors per hour over the entire sky. So, you can basically see much less than that because of the limited field of view of your eye. I started my stargazing around 1 AM and saw about 15 meteors until around 5 AM. Still, that is a very good rate to see some meteors in the night sky. For this photo, I set up my camera on top of my panorama head and started taking shots at f/2.0, ISO of 1000, and an exposure time of 20 seconds. I took 10 shots per scene to reduce the noise by photo stacking. This whole panorama is made up of 11 stacked photos (thus a total of 11x10=110 photos). Once I stitched the photos in postprocessing, I then looked at my individual photos and tried to find the photos that had meteors in them. All I could find were 5 meteors that you can see in this photo. What happened to the other 10 meteors? They were outside the field of view of the camera. I could move my head around very easily but could not do that with a camera! Amazing how advanced our body is, yet we keep ignoring it to a great degree. More surprising to me, however, was that I did not see the green meteor in this image with my own eyes as I was looking at different directions, but my camera captured it. It was absolutely amazing to see a green meteor in the photo, in fact the first time I saw a green meteor. Remember that meteors will appear with different colors depending on the material they are made of and the type of air they are passing through. I think a green meteor shows an abundance of Magnesium. I tried my best to make sure the white balance on this photo is close to reality but I had to change it a bit because the light pollution over at the horizon was really killing the beauty of the photo. One last note, if you look at the bottom left of the image, right on top of the tree next to the light pollution, you can see the Andromeda Galaxy (it appears as a small bright circle with concentric rings around it). Remember that this galaxy is the nearest galaxy to the milky way, yet it is 2.5 million light-years away!!! Isn’t that mind boggling?
Milky way transition through the nigh sky as night ends and astronomical twilight begins at Santa Margarita Lake, CA. I always love these milky way color transitions that happen in a very short span of time. As a reference, the photo on the very left was taken at 4:53 AM and the photo on the very right was taken at 5:06 AM. From this camping/astrophotography trip, I started taking milky way photos at an ISO of 1000 instead of 3200 or higher. This helped me get better color variation across my images as opposed to getting shots at an ISO of 3200 that makes most of the stars look white. If your camera has some degree of ISO invariance, that is the range within which your image quality is not going to degrade too much, you can lower your ISO and then compensate the darkness by increasing the exposure in post processing later. Low ISO photography brings a whole level of color gamut to the image that I quite like. I don’t mind trailing stars in the image of a milky way, so I kept the same exposure time of 20 seconds. I stacked 10 photos for better image quality and reduced noise level and am quite pleased with the results. I do not change the camera settings while taking these shots because my goal is to capture the milky way. This is why colors can look saturated on the photos to the right. Essentially those photos are overblown! For a panorama of milky way with the Andromeda galaxy and meteors in it, please look at the photo below.
Milky way galactic core rising above the trees in Los Padres national forest in CA! In this photo I tried to be creative and take a small panorama of the milky way galactic core with a telephoto lens! I had never taken a photo of the milky way with a telephoto lens even though I had seen sample images by other photographers. And I have to say that it was very difficult. The difficulty was multi-faceted:
1) My telephoto lens had a minimum f number of 4. This means that compared to a wide-angle lens with an f number of 2, my lens will collect 1/4th of the light that the wide-angle lens will collect. In a night photo like this, getting as much light as possible is essential for getting a good photo and I am already losing here by a factor of four.
2) At a focal length of 70 mm, stars will start trailing much easier than at a focal length of 20 mm. Roughly, the trailing is 3 times worse. So, my shutter speed should be much less. I used an 8-second shutter speed for this photo. Thus, comparing to the photo that we have just above, taken at a 20-second shutter speed, I will have roughly 3 times less light!
3) So now, we basically get 90% less light than a typical wide-angle lens. To compensate for that, I had to use an ISO of 8000!! I don’t think I have ever used this high of an ISO for a milky way photo (I have used a higher ISO for a lunar eclipse before which you can check in the moon section of the landscape astrophotography). Obviously at this high of an ISO, there will be significant noise in the image. In fact, the photo was very grainy. What I did on the field was to take 16 photos for each scene of the panorama and then stack them later on in post-processing to get rid of most of the noise. This small photo that you see is a 100-mega-pixel photo made up by stacking and stitching 128 images!
The whole process of taking the photo and then stacking ended up being too demanding, which is why I ended up not taking separate images for the foreground to make the whole image in focus, and exactly why I darkened the foreground to make a silhouette. I have to admit that the amount of detail that I can get out of this photo at a 70-mm focal length and the vibrant colors that I get out of the image is otherworldly. I have never seen such amount of detail and color out of my wide-angle-lens photos and I am looking into buying a prime lens with an f number below 2 just to take photos of the galactic core. It is such a nice-looking feature of our skies!
Milky Way above Shark Fin Cove. I had waited to take this image for years and I finally got it. The whole postprocessing was very detailed and laborious due to the humidity at the coast and took me many iterations to finally get something that is reasonable enough in terms of color balance and clarity. The whole story behind the photo is pretty long. I will update a bit later through the week.
Lick observatory and Orion nebula, seen from Mount Hamilton, CA. There are photography nights held at the Lick observatory for avid photographers to go up and take advantage of the dark skies on the east! But the sky to the west is a large light bulb called the Bay area. I drove all the way up through highway 130, which I think is the gnarliest road I have ever driven on in CA. If you ever drive this road, be careful. It is very steep, curly, and narrow and you need extreme caution. When I was there, I noticed that the light pollution is so much that there is no chance of getting a shot of the milky way at the south west (September time frame). So I waited until some of the winter constellations rise up in the sky and got this shot of the observatory with Orion Nebula on the very right of the image (the magenta color). I will not say it is the best composition of the night photos I have taken, but watching the nebula rise up and a background of an observatory made it a bit more eventful. This is a panorama that I took with a 50-mm focal length at an f# of 1.6, 8-s exposure, and ISO of 1250. It was very windy up there and I am amazed that my photo came out sharp. I thought the focus will be way off because my tripod is lightweight (good for backpacking trips) and I could visibly see some shakes, but I guess I just got lucky with this one. I will probably update this photo if I ever have a chance to go there when conditions are better for a night photo. This is another reminder that the pace at which we are losing out night skies is astounding and disheartening!