[jatrax]

So there I wouldn't have to plan anything but just about anywhere else I would

I was also surprised that the Milky way moves all night. Duh. But if you want to line up the stream of stars with some terrestrial object like a tree or mountain you need to know what time the stream will line up at the angle you want with the object that is the subject.

Last night I tried to shoot the Milky way from the house vertical over the river. But the only time that happens is 4 to 4:30am just minutes before beginning of sunrise brings too much light. It was only going to be practice as there is too much light pollution to get a good image but since it rained all night it did not matter anyway.

[aslyfox]

I am learning that in this niche planning is critical. There is no point driving hours to a dark sky area to shoot the Milky Way if the Milky Way is not visible on that night. I learned the hard way that just driving up into the mountains and expecting to get a great night sky shot is mostly going to fail. Timing, location and sky knowledge are critical. And then you have to still take a good image.

I think I might be in trouble at Yellowstone National Park in May as far as photographing the " Milky Way "
I plan on arriving on the 14th and leaving on the 20th

Yellowstone National Park · Geolocation
44.42817° N, -110.5886° E

If I am understanding this correctly:

_______________________________

" Tonight – May 7, 2018 – if you’re in a dark location at northern temperate latitudes, you might be searching for one of the sky’s most spectacular sights, the starlit band of the Milky Way. You won’t find it in the early part of the night. That luminous band of stars arcing across the dome of sky is nowhere to be seen as evening falls in May. Where is the the Milky Way at nightfall this month?

For starters, remember that the disk of our Milky Way galaxy is flat, like a pancake. At northern temperate latitudes, as evening falls in the month of May, the plane of the pancake-shaped galactic disk pretty much coincides with the plane of your horizon.

Because the Milky Way rims the horizon in every direction at nightfall and early evening, we can’t see this roadway of stars until later at night. Then … whoa! Beautiful.

The galactic disk rims the horizon at about 30 degrees North latitude – the latitude of St. Augustine, Florida. Appreciably north of this latitude, the galactic disk tilts a bit upward of the northern horizon. Appreciably south of 30 degrees north latitude, the galactic disk tilts a bit above the southern horizon.
Even so, the Milky Way is pretty much out of sight in our Northern Hemisphere sky during the evening hours in May.

But if you stay up until around midnight, you’ll begin to see the starlit band of the Milky Way rising in the eastern sky ".- http://earthsky.org/?p=30991

_____________________________

so if I am reading that source correctly it will be midnight or later before I would begin to see the Milky Way in the east near the horizon

can any one confirm and/or help me out?

[MossyRocks]

can any one confirm and/or help me out?

I would say go install StarWalk2 free on your phone and see where it is. StarWalk has an advance time feature so you can see how things move although it wants you to pay for every little add while SkyMap has a bunch of them for free. Between the 2 of them you should be able to get a good idea of what you could expect to see.

[jatrax]

I think I might be in trouble at Yellowstone National Park in May as far as photographing the " Milky Way "

According to my new favorite app: Photopills the Milky Way will be visible from midnight until about 4am on the 15th in the southern sky. Viewing is listed as excellent as the new moon is on the 15th. It will start out horizontal in the north and rotate through the east until it is vertical in the south at about 3 - 3:30am on the 15th.

The galactic center is listed as 16 degrees elevation so depending on the surrounding hills of your spot it might not be visible but the MW certainly will be.

Oddly I have a trip planned to the Alvord desert at the same tome to shoot the MW. I picked a spot at West Thumb Geyser Basin to use as my location because I'm familiar with it. Your specific location might be slightly different.

Suggest you get one of the apps listed and have a play before you go. Strong suggestion is to take the app and phone to your spot during the day, then advance the time so you can see what it will look like at night. Keep changing spots until you find what you want.

[MossyRocks]

Since I can't seem to find the post from Pete_XL where he provided the tutorials he used when learning how to process Deep Sky Object (DSO) images here are just the links:

A series on basic DSO processing
The full series on processing

I still need to find the notes from the astrophotography class last week, I think I left them in my car but I should be able to find them after dinner.

[aslyfox]

According to my new favorite app: Photopills the Milky Way will be visible from midnight until about 4am on the 15th in the southern sky. Viewing is listed as excellent as the new moon is on the 15th. It will start out horizontal in the north and rotate through the east until it is vertical in the south at about 3 - 3:30am on the 15th.

The galactic center is listed as 16 degrees elevation so depending on the surrounding hills of your spot it might not be visible but the MW certainly will be.

Oddly I have a trip planned to the Alvord desert at the same tome to shoot the MW. I picked a spot at West Thumb Geyser Basin to use as my location because I'm familiar with it. Your specific location might be slightly different.

Suggest you get one of the apps listed and have a play before you go. Strong suggestion is to take the app and phone to your spot during the day, then advance the time so you can see what it will look like at night. Keep changing spots until you find what you want.

thanks folks, keep the help coming

so if the clouds cooperate I may have a nap after dinner on the 15th and get up around 11

problem is driving the roads in the dark to get to my yet to be determined spot, not recommended in Yellowstone as I understand it after dark,

I will be at the Mammoth Lodge area of the North side of the park

[SunValley]

What potential does the below equipment have with astrophotography?

Without the astrotracer or equatorial mount I would go for the 15 or 21 mm and do starscapes. Keep your exposures around 15 to 25 s depending on how much trailling you can tolerate and make a few in a row so you can stack them in DeepSky Stacker. It will reduce the noise in the picture making post-processing a lot easier. Simple tools like Topaz Adjust and Topaz Clarity can then help bring out the details. Have a look at the threads in the astrophotography group, Pete_XL posted some very interesting post processing techniques, really easy to do even for me with Photoshop Elements 14.

Clear skies

[jatrax]

so if the clouds cooperate I may have a nap after dinner on the 15th and get up around 11

I am officially jealous. Yellowstone during a new moon to shoot astro. Sigh.

Keep us updated, I want to see pics!

[gifthorse]

The gear you have should work fine. The technique will be like shooting the Northern lights but you will have a time limit to prevent star trails. Divide 500 by the focal length of the lens (the 500 rule) to get the maximum exposure time ie 500/18 will give you about 28 seconds of exposure time. (About 23 seconds for a crop sensor.) For the Milky Way I often use a DA18-55 WR.
DA18-55WR


60 second exposure using the Astrotracer. The blurring is visible on the tree in the loser left corner. Vivitar 28mm f2 'close focusing lens.
A wide lens is good. A fast lens is good. A wide and fast lens is best. The Moon is a big factor in night shooting, especially for the Milky Way. If the Moon is more than about 25% illuminated it's overpowers the Milky Way.

This exposure was several minutes during a full Moon.


The setting Moon was about 28% illuminated. 45 second exposure. Two frames stitched in Lightroom.


15 second exposure using a Vivitar 28mm f2. The tufa (foreground was lit with a small flashlight.




10 second exposure Moon 80% illuminated


Plan the shoot for the new Moon or wait until the Moon is below the horizon. You'll likely need to process the images. There are a number of videos on Youtube that show how to process the images for the best results. I have (and like) the Astrotracer but the foreground will blur on very long exposures. And don't limit yourself to the Milky Way. There's lots of thing out there in the night sky.



An Iridium flare and a Perseid meteor in Orion.




The Moon, Venus and Mercury


The International space station


International space station and Orion nebula. Taken with a Takumar 200mm f4 4 second exposure.


International space station


Iridium flare

[aslyfox]

I am officially jealous. Yellowstone during a new moon to shoot astro. Sigh.

Keep us updated, I want to see pics!

Wish me luck, I have a lot to learn, never had tried any such photography and this thread today has caused me to consider trying to do it

Folks don't be shy in sending me hints and suggestions via pm

[MossyRocks]

Wish me luck, I have a lot to learn, never had tried any such photography

May advice is get out there now (it is still close to a new moon), find some darker area (in kansas it shouldn't be too hard) and practice, and screw up now and learn from your mistakes before it counts. Also learn how to use and calibrate the GPS in the dark and get comfortable doing it so you aren't wasting time figuring it out when you would rather be taking good pictures.

I have done one wider field astro pic that turned out pretty nice but there I found it was beneficial to shoot the stars (stacked), and then use one image for the foreground and the stacked image for the star field. Below is the image and here are the details. I stacked the star images in Deep Sky Stacker (DSS). This image was taken from the bottom of a ravine using a SMC Takumar 28mm F/3.5 lens stopped down to f/5.6, ISO 400, 10 stacked shots at 15s (in the astro photo group it would be written as 10x15s). I stacked the exposures in DSS which got rid of a lot of the noise but left a blurry foreground. I then took one of the images and loaded it in as a layer and in photoshop did a layer mask for the star field from the stack and the foreground for the single image. After that I I just adjusted the curves a bit to bring out some of the detail and since it was early make the sky have that blue glow.



Another easy target to take pictures of is the moon. The basic rule for the moon is use the looney 11 rule which will get your exposure basically correct. I find that if I take about 1/2 a stop out I get better results. When shooting the moon I will typically shot at f/8, ISO 200, and a shutter speed around 1/500s or 1/600s. When shooting the moon it is good to stick something in the foreground like with all non DSO or planet pictures. Also you want to use a big lens and be far away from the foreground object. I perfect example of this can be seen here where a 1200mm effective focal length was used. If you want to see a good discussion and samples of what people have done with moon shots you can check out this image critique of a moon shot. That said here is what I have been able to do with my megar 1980s vintage Vivitar 200mm f/3.5 lens using my recommended settings so you can get a pretty respectable image from a smaller telephoto. By the way this was hand held and I did stack images to stomp out the noise. This looks more impressive than it is as this is a 100% crop at 561x561 and I did not resample down to that.



Also I did some wider shots of the Orion Nebula (M42) using the plastic fantastic, SMC DA 35mm f/2.4. This is a heavy crop as I was still learning the basics of shooting astro images and I went way too long between recomposing so I had really bad stacking artefacts some of which show up even here in the corners but get much worse as we go out from there. This was created from a stack of 86 5 second (86x5s) exposures at f/4, ISO 800. What I learned here was that I should have upped the ISO to 1600 or even 3200 stopped the lens down to 5.6, and recomposed the image much more frequently. Even with all that the nebula is starting to show its glory. This is why I suggested bringing the 50mm 1.8 as while it would still have a wider field of view than this massive crop you could also stick some good foreground scenery in there and probably get a really nice photo out in Yellowstone. For that lens I would look to shoot at f/4 and use ISO 1600 at 4 seconds, stack 30 to 60 or so images of the object letting the foreground blur, then do a foreground shot with the exposure you want and combine them.



All of these were done without any form of tracking and other than the moon picture all were shot off of a tripod. For all of the tripod shots I use a release cable and was using the 2 second mirror up delay. Apart from the plastic fantastic all were shot with much older glass than what you have that is really punished by astrophotography. You will quickly find out where you lens stops producing fringing and halos and how good you are at manual focusing when doing this. ED and APO glass is a good thing to have. Now I really want to go up to my lake and do some night shots. If possible I will trade extra sharpness (another f-stop or less exposure time) for the added noise of a higher ISO and then just stack more images to work around the noise. Astrotracer should mitigate some of that but I would still stack images as there just isn't a lot of signal coming in. As ISO noise is mostly analogue gain before the DAC it seems like that would make better use of the scant photons and available dynamic range. With extra exposures you can work around that extra noise but blurriness from a non perfect focus and movement across multiple pixels is much harder to fix.

Now everyone who wants to give this a try learn from my mistakes, then make your own and learn from those too. One final word of advise shoot more up than out, this avoids shooting through a lot more atmosphere with the associated light pollution, dust and moisture all of which detract from the potential images, especially with DSOs.

[Auzzie-Phoenix]

You can get SkEYE a free skymap app for android. My personal suggestion for moon/sun/milky way planning is Sun Surveyor Pro. You can plan in advance, see angle of elevation at specific times, eye of milky way center position, etc... Also tells you blue/golden hours, sunrise/sunset/moonrise/moonset. Will also show moon phase. This early in the year, the milky way isn't going to be easy to spot and it will be harder to pick up even on new moon nights. Peak viewing is as a summertime object. About middle to late may is when it starts becoming more visible.

[DimC]

According to my new favorite app: Photopills the Milky Way will be visible from midnight until about 4am on the 15th in the southern sky. Viewing is listed as excellent as the new moon is on the 15th. It will start out horizontal in the north and rotate through the east until it is vertical in the south at about 3 - 3:30am on the 15th.

The galactic center is listed as 16 degrees elevation so depending on the surrounding hills of your spot it might not be visible but the MW certainly will be.

Oddly I have a trip planned to the Alvord desert at the same tome to shoot the MW. I picked a spot at West Thumb Geyser Basin to use as my location because I'm familiar with it. Your specific location might be slightly different.

Suggest you get one of the apps listed and have a play before you go. Strong suggestion is to take the app and phone to your spot during the day, then advance the time so you can see what it will look like at night. Keep changing spots until you find what you want.

I strongly recommend Photopills, the best 10€ I've spent on a photography Smartphone app. It's like a swiss knife for photography.
They have some great tutorials as well to help you.

I just subscribed to this thread as I plan on doing some Milky way shots in 2 weeks. Even if this wont be perfect condition because of the moon lighting, but at least I wanna try as I will be in a remote place with dark night and few light pollution.

About a year ago I tried one night to shoot the MW, with my 20-35mm F4 lens. The main issue was trying to compose my shots in the dark night, even with LV and high ISO it was kinda hard.
Second issue was the astrotracer function that I struggled to calibrate.
After reviewing images I was not satisfied so I did not processed them, I should give them a new look maybe.
thats at this time that I bought Photopills and it was so simple to plan the shoot, with their AR night tracking you can precisely see where the MW will be depending on your position, elevation etc.

As far as I can see, planning is super important.
Planning your date and time, New Moon, light pollution, weather, stacking image, focus stack the foreground (separate exposure for foreground) etc...
This is a nice challenge !

[FreeSpirit9]

[aslyfox]

for laughs I have started to check out the predictions for weather in Yellowstone National Park for the time I expect to be there

while doing so, I found predictions for sky cover

not too good

Daily Stargazing Weather for Yellowstone National Park, WY

Daily Stargazing Weather for Yellowstone National Park, WY

one can hope it will change but for now it ranges from 95 % cloud cover to 53 % cloud cover

new moon on 5/15 first quarter 5/21

2018 Moon Phases - Calendar-12.com