Many people would know the expression “May you live in Interesting times”… I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy during these “interesting” times… it wasn’t the way I planned to start the year but here we are in June and I must say I have learned some things along the way…
One of the advantages has been staying home and that gives some flexibility in our regular schedules… this allowed us to go out and explore at unusual hours… with the beautiful spring weather we’ve had in southern Germany, there have been many clear days… while not ideal for normal landscape photography (big blue skies can be a little boring), the clear nights have allowed us to try our hand at Astrophotography… at this time of year that means leaving home at 11pm and getting back around 3-4 am…. we have some locations with reasonable dark skies within a one hour drive so we have ventured out on a couple of occasions…
When doing this type of photography, a bit of preparation is needed so that when you get to the location, you don’t have to guess too much…. there are a few apps and websites which help with the planning (Photopills for one)… also fully charged batteries, empty memory cards and sturdy tripods… a headlamp with a red light is also helpful to maintain your night vision though make sure to use it with caution so it doesn’t show up too much in your final images (you’ll see why I said that later)
Hohenzollern Castle with Milky Way, Nikon D850, 20mm, f2.8, 6 seconds, ISO 12800
Of course, as with any shoot, you also have to have a little luck… I was shooting a series of images for a timelapse (every 10 seconds)… for the shot above, a car drove up the road behind us and it’s headlights illuminated the tree and hillside… it must have still been far away at this time as the tree is quite nicely lit… in the next images, it was much too bright to be useful but I quite like the balance in this shot….
Same setting and camera as above but stacking of 350 images to form the trails
Shooting multiple images for a timelapse gives a bit of flexibility in the editing process later as you can combine the images in many ways… for the stacked image of star trails above, I was able to remove the images with the car headlights but still get enoguh images for the trails… the above images represents approx one hours worth of movement in the stars… the timelapse video is embedded below… you’ll see where the car passed through the shot (Twice) and also where I wasn’t as careful as I thought with the headlamp (red foregrounds… ooops)… overall I’m very happy with the shots and I learned a lot to apply next time when the weather and schedules cooperate