How to do night stars / milky way images

You might find this link useful for post processing.

I know you use PS not LR but you can figure out the differences.


https://fstoppers.com/education/how-pos ... room-85268

Check out Andy Astbury
http://wildlifeinpixels.net/shopfront/d ... -workflow/

Dave

Just saw this today or I would have chimed in sooner. I posted this here in the comments of one of my shots, but it seems appropriate here:
My stack and align process:

I do mild exposure, highlights, shadows, white balance, noise, sharpening, coma correct in LR. Do not lens profile correct ( it will make things harder later) Do one image and then copy the settings to the rest you plan to stack.

Import as layers to PS.

If you have a set group  that you want as your foreground, make them invisible. If not, duplicate your layers and set the duplicates to invisible.

For your visible sky layers, make them all invisible but the one at the bottom of the stack. Create a layer mask that covers everything except the sky and copy the mask to each sky layer.

Starting with your bottom layer visible, turn on visibility on the layer above and set the layer to difference. Hit Control+T. This will allow you to manually align each layer. Use a combination of Free Transform and Warp until you get all of the stars to align (turn black) It's a tedious process, but goes quicker with practice.

Go layer by layer, from bottom to top, Only having two layers visible at a time; the bottom one, and the one you're aligning to the bottom one. When finished with each layer alignment return the layer to normal.

Once finished aligning, make all layers visible, delete masks and convert to smart object. Under Layers, choose smart object, then stack mode and select median. That should clean it up and decrease the noise.

Repeat for foreground, align the various layers (all should be smart objects at this point) flatten image and go about your usual editing process from there. You can profile correct at this point. (profile correction makes aligning layers exponentially harder from my experience)

Tim,

One thing you can do to make sure you're facing exactly where you want to be for the Milky Way is to pre-plan using Stellarium and Google Earth. That way you will know exactly when and where the Milky Way will be and can line up shots accordingly. Bring a compass in the field and you're set.

As for the 500 rule, it holds true to a certain degree, however I still get star trails at 14 mm with 30 sec. exposure. To get pinpoint stars all the way to the corners, I use a high ISO (8 or 10K) and 10 sec. exposure and double the number of exposures I take and stack to compensate for noise.

Regarding the noise in high ISO shots, I find I get less-than satisfactory results pushing underexposed shots in post than I do using much higher ISOs and getting exposure dialed in in-camera

Hi Tim,
In addition to all the great information already posted, actually catching the Milky Way does depend on the time of the year (and time of night) you do the shooting as well. You may already know this, but the galactic core is only visible during summer months, and rises above the horizon earlier each day as the summer goes on. During the winter it is only above the horizon during daylight hours. I second using Stellarium. It's a great tool for seeing what part of the sky it will be in at a given time.

I've found that light pollution is visible a surprising distance away from the source. Dark sky finders (like this: http://darksitefinder.com/map/) are useful to figure out where potential sources of light pollution are. I believe I read that light pollution can be visible 60 miles away from major sources of light, but I'm not positive about that number. Generally, the farther away the light pollution, the lower on the horizon the glow from it will be. Weather conditions will also affect light pollution, as clouds will reflect more of it back down to your camera. In addition, smoke is really good at blocking the Milky Way, so if you're getting any from nearby wildfires that could be contributing to your issues.

Good luck,
Nathaniel

Hi Tim

I've done enough Milky Way shooting to be quite confident in asserting that you will have a ton of light pollution at your place. Try going up past Jordan River and find a light sheltered beach to shoot from. I've shot from behind Mt Washington when all the resort lights are off and the Vancouver lights, which are out of the field of view, still pollute significantly.

Cheers
Rory

Hi Tim,

coming in a little late, I've dabbled in fixed tripod Astro photos on and off over the years, many years ago I had a tracking mount I used with film cameras.  I've noticed a few points when shooting comets etc.

You want the fastest lens and best high ISO performance, What you are shooting is very faint.
Wide fast lenses are better as you can expose longer before trailing becomes apparent.  
Stacking is a necessary evil, and it makes composite foreground/sky shots that much harder - whenever you mask you are going to fight edge effects at the interface between sky and foreground.
Photoshop will struggle to align stacked images - you get field rotation as you are not on a tracking equatorial mount.  PS can't handle that in my experience.
Stacking without a foreground is much simpler.  Deep Sky Stacker (free program) does a decent job, though colour balancing the files it produces seems to have a steep learning curve.
Light Pollution will give you colour casts but should not prevent you capturing images.  It basically reduces contrast, so stretching the image should bring out any detail captured by the camera.  This is just basically a levels adjustment.  People successfully do deep sky imaging from cities with CCD cameras, so a site that seems dark should be quite possible to capture the Milky Way.
Use your full frame camera, you will capture more photons.
Focusing is important - Use live view to focus on a bright star or in a pinch I've used AF to focus on a distant streetlight.
Here's some examples from a few years back using a a 1D MKIIn, not the best low noise camera by any stretch of the imagination:

Single frame  18mm f3.5, 30s @ ISO1600:   same frame stretched: stack of 8 frames: These frames are looking out over the ocean to the east and the ships at anchor are providing some light pollution.  This is the same frame as shot:
as you can see there's not much there, so you need to  take you images put them through the Raw converter adjust black and white points and then do levels.  Particularly with the white point you might be clipping somewhat as the stars are all saturated, hold down the alt key while sliding the white point to see what is clipping, as long as only stars clip it is fine.  

With your equipment I'm thinking the D600 and 24mm wide open.  If you are stacking with deep sky stacker you can use flat field frames to fix vignetting.  You can also turn off long exposure noise reduction and take separate dark frames to subtract if you want.  Start with 10 barks and 10 flats.  Try different settings to see what exposure you can use without trailing.  The exposure you can use is actually related to the declination of the frame not your latitude.  Closer to the celestial pole you can use longer exposures, but a 24mm lens covers a wide field so harder to take advantage of that.  If you want to take small steps rather diving in headfirst try doing stacked shots without foreground first up, one less complication with the foreground.

Happy to answer specific questions you might have on this.

PS:

Your D600 is rated at ISO2950 by DXo Mark and the D810 at ISO2853, the best Nikon in the list is the Df rated at ISO3279. So the D600 is about 1/6 of a stop off the best Nikon, So in theory you should be able to set the D600 at 20s/f2.8 ISO6400 and get something similar to what Tony did for Baines Baobabs.

By way of comparison my 1DMkIIn is rated at ISO975. 1.5 stops less

the Dxo score is the ISO at which noise reaches a certain level so allows you to compare performance of bodies.

Chris, give Starry Landscape Stacker a shot - makes that land to stacked sky interface handling a total breeze.

Might need to wait for the WIndows version !

I released this ebook in 2011....a video is also on my website from a presentation I did: https://store.naturescapes.net/a-digita ... kurywczak/