Photographing the Night Sky

My friend and I set out about 1.5 hour away from the big city to find a remote place where there was very little light pollution. It was so remote I could hear cows mooing in the distance. We setup our tripods and proceeded to take photos with shutterspeeds of 30+ seconds. The results were beautiful.

The Milky Way

I still cannot believe thats a photo I took. At first I thought my camera screen was fuzzy or the lens was dirty, but then I quickly realized that it was in fact, gas clouds from the milky way.

The Big Dipper

Post-processing in Lightroom

I followed this night photography tutorial and learned some neat features in Lightroom.

Before:

Camera Settings: ISO 400, 18 mm, f/4.5, 30.0 seconds

This is the original image I took RAW, was very dark.

Processing in Lightroom:

I added +1.70 Exposure, +37 Contrast, ,  +32 Highlights,  +Clarity.

Noise reduction: This feature is BRILLIANT!! Whenever I've taken photos with high ISO I always get so much noise. So if you go under "Detail" and slide the scale for "Noise Reduction" (Luminance) from to 75 to 100  it does a wonderful job of removing all the grainyness from the night sky.

After: I then adjusted the temperature and tint to give a colour that I preferred. 

The stars were not as luminous apparently as they could have been, and that orange glow you see in the picture is actually from a nearby city. 

Definitely something I'd like to try again!

 

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