Photographing
the Milky Way
Milky Way photography isn’t quite the same as shooting sunsets or daytime landscapes. Sure, those skills help (you’ll need a good grasp of exposure, composition, and camera settings) but the real challenge (besides clouds) for the night, is time. Not just exposure time, but timing in every sense.
Shot around 9:00 pm (July 29, 2025), light haze from wildfire smoke dimmed and browned blue hour.
At around 12:30 am (Aug 1, 2025), Green air glow and a beautiful meteor crossed the Milky Way.
1
Shutter time
Expose long enough to gather enough star light.
2
Time of night
It has to be dark enough to see the stars clearly.
3
Time of month
The moon can be too bright to see stars well.
4
Time of year
The core of the milky way isn’t always visible.
5
Time of shoot
When the core is in a good position for your shot.
One of the fun things about night time photography is that the colour of the sky is always changing. Contrary to popular belief, the sky is not black. Human eyes can see golden hour (around sunset/sunrise), blue hour (transition to darkness when stars become visible), and twilight (nighttime). Cameras can see much more. As a result, night photos can offer up gorgeous colours in an assumed dark place.
Beyond time, we need to consider our equipment.
Camera
Any DLSR will work. A full crop FX will give you a larger image to edit.
Lens
You’ll want a lens with a big aperture between f1.4 and f2.8 to gather light.
Tripod
Long exposures mean the camera must remain perfectly still.
Intervalmeter
A remote trigger helps you to avoid touching/shaking the camera.
Star Tracker
Counters the rotation of Earth, allowing for long exposures.
Starting out, you’ll want to use a wide angle lens. I keep two wide lenses in my kit: 14-24mm and 24mm (f2.8 apertures). At 14mm, I can see a lot of sky. That’s great for catching meteors and big landscapes. The 24mm narrows the field of view a big, keeping mountains and foreground in view. Just watch for blurring (coma) at the outer ends of your lenses.
A sturdy tripod is essential so your camera doesn’t move in light winds. Nothing ruins a shot faster that blur from movement.
Use manual focus on a distant light source to focus in the dark. Ideally a star, or a porch light on a house far away. The finer the dot, the better your focus.
Plan the shoot. My fave apps for planning night photos include: PhotoPills (for the technical details), Windy (wind & clouds), Ephemeris (Milky Way position), Lunar Phase (moon phase & brightness), Maps (location), and the Weather app.
Technical Aspects of Shutter/Exposure Time
Exposure length matters. A wide angle lens (say 14mm) allows you to set a shutter speed up to 26 seconds before stars stretch out. Whereas a longer lens (say, 24mm), would allow you to shoot approximately 15 seconds before the stars stretch. Imagine how little time you’d have if shooting at 50mm (7.5 sec), or with a longer lens. The shorter the time, the dimmer the image. (PhotoPills App)
Star Trackers counter the rotation of the earth to allow us to shoot much longer shutter speeds. Even using a wide angle lens, without a tracker the longest we can shoot is 25 seconds before stars blur. With a tracker, shutter times can span minutes collecting light and detail from the sky.
Trackers come with either GOTO mounts or manual equatorial mounts. GOTO mounts align the tracker for you but cost more. Manual mounts take time and know-how to set up but are much cheaper and portable to use.
Shoot one of each type and combine them into a composite image (I use Photoshop).
Compositing. The majority of astro photography (night time) images are two or more shots combined. The reason for this is that capturing the night sky requires much longer exposure times than capturing the land does (foreground).
The length of these longer exposures is important too since the Earth is spinning. Too long of exposure, and the stars stretch out to become blurry egg-shapes or even long lines which is another photo technique. Too short of exposure time, and your dark sky image will be too dim to see the milky way clearly.
How Cameras and Humans See the Night Differently
Camera sensors. While human eyes can see some colours, camera sensors can “see” the full spectrum of colours in the night sky, including infrareds, UV, x-rays, and more. Camera manufacturers add a filter on top of the sensor to reduce what the camera “sees” so photos are closer to what humans see. Astro photographers often change that filter to let in more visible light – but not all of it – to increase the range of colours they can photograph and to gain greater detail in their images.
A note on night vision. When we’re in low light, our pupils widen to let in more light. After a few minutes, a protein receptor called rhodopsin starts to activate the rods in your retina. This process takes about 30 minutes. Take a glance at your phone screen, and you’ll need to wait another 30 minutes to see well. While night vision helps us see in the dark, human eyes are incapable of detecting more than a trace of colour. That’s why cameras can see more that us.
