Sky and Telescope - October 2015 - 67

Alan Dyer
Here are some essential tips for shooting the
night sky above picturesque landscapes.
For decades, astrophotography gurus advised newcomers to
start with simple camera-on-tripod shots before graduating to the
advanced task of shooting celestial targets through telescopes. This
was meant to teach the limits of normal photographic techniques;
targets in the night sky are almost always faint and require long
exposures to record adequately. But without tracking to counteract
Earth's rotation, you were limited to only a few seconds or so before
trailing compromised your shot. Next, you'd get a tracking mount
and continue from there.
What those guides didn't account for is the power and simplicity
of digital single-lens reﬂex (DSLR) cameras. These allowed astrophotographers to discover the beauty of nightscape photography as a
unique pursuit in itself. Now many devote all their nights - indeed
their careers - to shooting nightscapes exclusively using the simplest of equipment.
While a lot of complex gear isn't necessary to become involved in
nightscape photography, securing great results comes from learning how to get the most out of your equipment. Here are some of the
"trade secrets" that can help you record breathtaking results yourself.

Low-Noise Cameras

FLOODLIT Unlike deep-sky imagers,
nightscape photographers welcome
moonlit nights! The Moon illuminates the
foreground in natural light while turning
the star-ﬁlled sky deep blue. The author
shot the scene above in Arches National
Park, Utah, using the Canon EOS 6D
DSLR, 14-mm lens, and intervalometer
pictured at right.
ALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR

Your choice of camera is arguably one of the most important factors
for nightscape photography. And while you might already own a
DSLR, look carefully at its speciﬁcations before assuming you've
got that base covered. The most important camera speciﬁcation in a
good nightscape camera isn't the highest number of megapixels but
rather its ability to produce low-noise images.
There are two paths to achieving this goal. The ﬁ rst is simply
to buy a new camera. Manufacturers are always improving the
ﬁrmware that performs the internal processing of images, as
well as incorporating the latest low-noise sensors. Cameras
that are more than four or ﬁve years old will often produce
noisier images at comparable ISO settings than the newest
models, even when other speciﬁcations look similar.
When shopping for this new camera, look for one with
large pixels. While some top-end cameras these days oﬀer
upwards of 36- to 50-megapixel arrays, full-frame chips with 20
to 24 megapixels will generally perform better for astrophotography. In these cameras, each photosite (pixel) is about 6 microns
across, which inherently produces less noise than smaller
pixels. This is because, just as with telescope aperture, larger
pixels collect more light than small ones do.
The best nightscape cameras tend to be "full-frame"
models with a 24-by-36-mm CMOS sensor. By comparison,
typical 20-megapixel APS-format or "cropped-frame" camSk yandTelescope.com October 2015

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Sky and Telescope - October 2015

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