📸 ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY 📸

Stacked Milky Way Galaxy Photo

One warm July night, I went on a night photography trip. The goal of the trip was to photograph the Milky Way. I discovered a wealth of new and interesting information and tips on how to maximize the quality of Milky Way photos. How to take and process photos so that the details of our galaxy are clear, the stars aren't blurry, and the amount of noise is minimal. This is where stacking multiple exposures comes in handy.

This method involves taking a dozen or even dozens of photos. Unfortunately, when photographing night sky objects, we can't afford to extend the exposure time too much. This causes the stars to blur, appearing "elongated" rather than pinpoint (only in the star trail method is this acceptable, or even desirable). Because of this, we need to increase the ISO sensitivity, but this unfortunately increases the amount of noise. Stacking solves this very problem. By taking a large number of identical photos and then combining them (there are special programs that do all the combining for us), noise is reduced to a minimum. Such photos also have a wider dynamic range and allow for significantly more detail than from a single exposure.

My photo shown here was created from 23 frames taken with a 15-second exposure time. This was the maximum exposure time I could set to avoid blurring the stars. Each lens has its own allowable exposure time for achieving pinpoint stars. This depends primarily on the focal length. The wider the angle, the longer the exposure time. I set the ISO sensitivity to 5000. Individual frames at this sensitivity contained a tremendous amount of noise. After stacking, there was almost none!

There are also more advanced photography methods that allow for significantly longer exposure times, even up to several dozen minutes. However, this requires a specialized astrophotography mount. Such a device is equipped with a mechanism that tracks the movement of stars in the sky. The camera is placed on it, and it adjusts the speed of movement to the rotation and movement of the stars in the sky, reducing star blur. However, I don't have such equipment, and I'm only mentioning this as a curiosity :)

I processed the stacked image in Camera Raw and Photoshop. It took a lot of time. Unfortunately, to get a truly good final image of the Milky Way, you have to spend a lot of time extracting details. This has to be done gradually, step by step, to avoid overdoing it. However, I think it was worth it. This is the best photo of the Milky Way's center so far in my career. The season is slowly coming to an end, and soon the galaxy's center will no longer be visible in Poland. Perhaps I'll manage to photograph it at least once more.

PS. There's one more important thing. This method requires taking a single exposure specifically for the foreground/landscape portion of the photo. Here, we can significantly lengthen the exposure time and lower the ISO. This is necessary because the sky and ground must be processed separately. If they are processed together, the ground will come out terribly dark and contrasty!