nightsky

The Northern Lights have been lighting up the sky over Iceland these past few days, and stunning photos of the auroras have been lighting up the Internet.

The website Clear Dark Sky has been mentioned in a few tutorials posted here on PetaPixel, but if you've never heard of this incredible weather resource for photographers you're in for a real treat.

This made us very sad. According to a new report published in the Journal of Science Advances, one third of humanity and approximately 80% of North Americans can no longer see the Milky Way from where they live due to light pollution.

If you are willing to get up early or stay up super late, Milky Way season is back in North America! Above is a shot I made on February 14th, 2016, in Sedona, Arizona. This image was taken at 5:45 AM, just prior to sunrise. Something I tried for the first time with this photo is taking 10 consecutive shots of the sky at a higher ISO (5000) and shorter shutter speed (15s), and then stacking the photos, which gives you awesome pinpoint stars with minimal noise.

Here's a walkthrough of how I made the shot.

We recently shared a 52-week photo challenge you can do to improve you skills over the course of a year. The challenge for week #1 was "self portrait," and photographer Trevor Mahlmann completed it by creating this eye-popping photo, titled "The Universe At My Feet."

Did you know that you can easily see geostationary satellites by shooting time-lapse photos of the night sky? Reddit user jannne took his camera outside this week and managed to capture a number of satellites in their photos.

Photographer Michael Shainblum created this 20-minute step-by-step video showing how he goes about post-processing a Milky Way photograph using Adobe Lightroom CC.

Adobe's new Dehaze slider has been wowing photographers since it was launched for Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW last month. We've seen what it can do for haze, rainy days, and blizzards, but there's yet another interesting application: enhancing photos of the starry night sky.

Our sun goes through a solar cycle with an average length of 11 years, and the period of greatest solar activity during each cycle is called the solar maximum. Photographer Henry Jun Wah Lee visited Iceland during the latest solar maximum and shot photos for this dazzling time-lapse film titled "Apotheosis."

Finnish photographer Tiina Törmänen wanted to capture how small and fragile humans are in the unfathomable expanse of space, so she shot a series of stunning self-portraits showing her silhouette dwarfed by a backdrop of stars and the Northern Lights. The series is titled "Wanderer."

This starry double exposure-style photograph was made using a single long exposure. Photographer Ted Schiele was 190 seconds into a long exposure photo of the night sky when he heard a car coming down the road. He then pointed his camera down towards the car and exposed the camera for another 13 seconds as it approached.

I was in the middle of Yosemite during the "Blood Moon" lunar eclipse on April 4th, 2015. Here's the story of the cool experience I had shooting it.

Polish photographer Bartosz Wojczyński pointed his camera straight at the north celestial pole and exposed his camera for a total of six hours. The photograph above is what resulted.

Photographer Mark Gee shot this photograph of …

February has brought back the galactic core of the Milky Way into the sky. It is now rising in the east just before sunrise. Each week it will rise a little bit earlier in the night.

I have a trip planned for this spring and have been thinking about some of the shots I want to do. One of them is one where I think a lens longer than the 24mm might be useful to really bring some mountains and the Milky Way together.

A few days ago I was lucky enough to capture Jupiter’s triple moon transit right from my driveway in Denver.

In 2013, photographer Brad Goldpaint and his wife Marci quit their day jobs, sold all of their possessions, and began living out of a motorhome while traveling through the Western United States. Their new career was teaching photography workshops while educating the public about the damaging effects of light pollution.

As the duo moved from place to place through some of the nation's most pristine wilderness areas, Goldpaint spent countless nights out in the dark, capturing long exposure photos over many hours with his camera gear. The images have since been put together into an independent stop-motion film titled “Illusion of Lights: A Journey into the Unseen.” Above is the film's trailer.

Here's a tutorial that will teach you how to photograph and process one of the most colorful parts of the night sky, the Orion constellation. It will walk you through all the steps of planning, shooting, and processing a photograph of Orion and the colorful features in it.

UK-based videographer Cal Thomson recently got into astrophotography and creating time-lapses of the …

In astrophotography, a star tracker is a piece of gear that compensates for the Earth’s rotation so you can take sharp long exposure photographs of the night sky.

Unfortunately, not everyone can get their hands on one of these, and so we've dug up this awesome tutorial by astrophotographer Forrest Tanaka on how to capture impressive astrophotography images without a star tracker.

Ever since I’ve owned a camera I’ve wanted to take photos of the night sky. When I first got a DSLR camera 5 or so years ago I thought getting decent shots wasn’t very likely with the inexpensive gear I had and it was something best left to the pros. It was only after I became comfortable with the manual mode on my camera that I realized that shooting at night was completely doable.

If you enjoy gazing up at the heavens and being in awe of how expansive the universe is, then here's a time-lapse project you have to check out. It's a beautiful time-lapse of the Milky Way by Greek photographer Konstantinos Vasilakakos (be sure to watch it in high definition).

While it's not radically different from other Milky Way timelapse out there, it does a great job at capturing the scale of the night sky.

The Aurora Borealis (AKA Northern Lights) often makes an appearance in time-lapse videos of the night sky, but have you ever seen what it looks like in real time? That's what Korean astrophotographer Kwon O Chul was able to capture in the video above.

A common technique used in still astrophotography is the creation of startrails, a method by which a photographer overlays multiple long-exposure shots of the stars to create a weaving of constellations. But, as time-lapse photograph and astrophotography have merged in a fairly recent trend, a number of artists have been bringing the idea of startrails to motion-picture, creating what many refer to as ‘vortex startrails.’

When you think night sky time-lapse, what are the first places that come to mind? Probably somewhere in Iceland, maybe a few spots in Hawaii, but one location that probably doesn't make the list is the country of Kazakhstan.

No, it's not just a punchline from the movie Borat. As photographer Denis Frantsouzov shows you in the mesmerizing time-lapse video above, it's also one of the best places to go if you want to capture the night sky.

Five months after releasing his first tutorial video on shooting and processing time-lapse photography, Dustin Farrell is back at it again. This time he's gone more in depth, featuring some behind the scenes of his nighttime time-lapse workflow, from the gear he uses (and suggests) to the actual creation process of the video.

Bob Avakian and his wife Gail visited Martha’s Vineyard for the summer in 1973, and it has been home ever since. Trained in architecture, engineering and building, for years he has worked in the construction field as a custom homebuilder. After finding himself in management, removed from the satisfaction of hands-on involvement, he turned to photography as a means of self-expression.

As his photographic vision has evolved he has been drawn to the natural landscape and an exploration of night photography.

When you think of the Jersey Shore what are the first things that come to mind? The beach? The ocean? The amusement park rides? Summer? But there is one sight that goes completely unnoticed by so many shore goers each and every year in the town of Cape May. That sight is the night sky!

When we see video of the Milky Way, it's usually not video per se -- more often than not it's a time-lapse. That's because the exposure time needed to capture the Milky Way in most situations makes shooting a standard video a challenge. One production company decided that technology had advanced far enough to give it a try though, and what they came up with was quite cool.

When it comes to visible light photos of the night sky, Hubble has been king. That's because Earth-bound telescopes -- even those with much higher-quality optical systems than Hubble -- must deal with the blurring effects of our planet's atmosphere.

A newly developed camera called VisAO, however, has done away with that problem, and in the process enabled astronomers to take the highest-resolution visible light photos ever captured of the night sky.

Long exposure photographs of stars and romantic engagement photographs aren't often found together, but that's the fusion wedding photography couple Robert Paetz and Felicia Wong have been dabbling with as of late. The duo takes their clients out into natural landscapes away from light-polluted cities and photographs them under the night sky. They call the resulting photos, "astro wedding photography."

If you've never attempted to photograph the night sky, be it a constellation or a planet, the idea may seem daunting. You may think that you need a specific type of camera or that you need to invest in a high-quality telescope.

While those things can be true in certain situations, astronomer Mark Thompson takes a minute in the video above to show you how to capture great photos of the night sky using very little in way of equipment.

Check out this aurora photograph captured last Friday night by photographer Mike Hollingshead. See those small red squiggly lines in the sky? That's an extremely rare form of lightning called a sprite. This photograph is one of the only times a sprite and an aurora have been captured in the same frame.

For over a year now, photographer Shawn Stockman Malone of LakeSuperiorPhoto has been pointing her cameras at the sky over Michigan's Lake Superior and capturing dazzling displays of the Northern Lights.

Ever see those pictures where the stars streak across the sky in a big arc? Or maybe the whole sky looked like it was spinning? What you saw was star trails. The streaks were light left behind on the sensor or film from the star as it traveled across the sky in front of an open camera shutter. In fact, what are being recorded are stationary stars and the rotation of the earth as it spins past them. For me, the images seem to have a certain magic or mystery about them.

You must have heard a photographer talking about capturing that perfect moment in time. Well for capturing star trails you will need to capture the perfect hour or two in time. For such amazing looking images, the technique used to capture them is really quite simple. Keep reading for a complete set of instructions from start to finish.