stars

DL Cade

Go Behind the Scenes with Talented Time-Lapse Photographer Michel Shinblum

Michael Shainblum is a name that has come up a few times on PetaPixel, and it's always associated with a spectacular time-lapse that earns many a "beautifully done" and even the occasional "hot damn." And now, thanks to The Creators Project, we get to go behind the scenes with Shainblum as he creates one of his masterpieces.

DL Cade

Using Long-Exposure Photos for a Real-Time Video of the Milky Way

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.

DL Cade

Building a DIY Barn Door Tracking Mount for Long-Exposure Astrophotography

Getting quality astrophotography shots comes with several challenges, and one of the main ones is that the starts don't stand still -- or, more accurately, we don't. Since the Earth enjoys spinning on its axis once every 24-hours or so, exposures in excess of about 1 second begin producing star trails unless you have the camera or telescope on some sort of tracking mount.

Fortunately, if you don't have the money to purchase a $1,000+ equatorial mount but still want to take long-exposure astrophotography, the DIY barn door tracking mount above will enable you to do so on the (relatively) cheap.

DL Cade

Fourth of July Fireworks and Lightning Captured in One Lucky Shot

Some people have all the luck right? The above photo was taken by photographer Jason Smith, and it's a great example of the right place meeting the right time. While taking 4th of July photos at a friend's house, he was able to capture a lightning strike that synched perfectly with some fireworks.

Michael Zhang

Long Exposure Engagement Photos Shot Under the Starry 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."

Michael Zhang

Earthquake Turns Photographer’s Jupiter Photo Into a Light Painting

"Earthquake astrophotography light painting." How's that for a novel photography technique? It sounds strange, it's an apt description of how photographer Andrew Dare captured the squiggly photo above (on right). Dare was photographing the night sky with long exposures when an earthquake struck while his shutter was open.

Trevor Williams

A Complete Guide to Star Trailing

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.

Michael Zhang

Amateur Astrophotographers and Hubble Tag Team to Create Galaxy Photo

The space agencies that run the Hubble Space Telescope may have some of the most powerful photographic equipment at their disposal, but every now and then they can still use a little help from amateur astrophotographers.

Amateur astrophotographer Robert Gendler created the beautiful photograph above showing the spiral galaxy M106 by compositing existing imagery captured by the Hubble telescope with his own photos captured from Earth.

Michael Zhang

Photographs from the Edge of the World

Mikko Lagerstedt is a self-taught photographer based-in Finland who only started shooting back in December 2008. Since then, he has captured a number of hauntingly beautiful landscape photographs showing both stars and self-portrait silhouettes hovering over the horizon line. His latest project is simply titled "Edge", and features "atmospheric photography" of the Finnish landscape.

Michael Zhang

Stacked Star Trail Time-Lapse Created with Photos Shot from Space

We're shared a couple of "stacked star trail" time-lapse videos over the past few months (see here and here), but those videos comprised nighttime photographs taken from the ground. Photographer Christoph Malin recently decided to try his hand at the technique, but instead of using his own earthbound photographs, he used NASA photographs shot from the International Space Station. The resulting video, shown above, features the stars drawing trails across the "sky" while the Earth creates light streaks down below.

Michael Zhang

Beautiful Time-Lapse of Long Exposure Star Trails Traversing the Night Sky

North Carolina-based photographer Daniel Lowe sent us the gorgeous video above, which shows star trails forming and floating across the sky. Most time-lapse videos of the night sky show stars as points of light, rotating around Earth's pole. Lowe's video shows the long streaks of star trails doing the rotating, making the video even more surreal and magical.

Michael Zhang

This is What You Get When You Stack Photos of a Meteor Shower

Capturing a single shooting star can make for a brilliant photograph, but what does it look like if you composite multiple meteors into a single image? Fort Collins, Colorado-based nature photographer David Kingham decided to find out recently during the ongoing Perseid meteor shower. The amazing photo seen above is what resulted.

Michael Zhang

Awe-Inspiring Family Portrait Features the Milky Way as the Backdrop

The next time you're out in a non-light polluted place with your family and your camera, try using our galaxy as a backdrop. Hawaii-based photographer John Hook shot this ridiculously awesome photograph of him, his wife, and his daughter staring up at the Milky Way. As if that weren't perfect enough, there's also a shooting star photobombing the portrait in the lower right hand corner!

Michael Zhang

Outer Space in a Studio: Nebulae Photos Using Fiber Glass Lamps

At first glance, the images in Fabian Oefner's Nebulae might look like images of distant galaxies captured with a space telescope. They were actually shot in a studio using a number of fiber glass lamps. Oefner used exposures of different lengths to capture the ends of the lit fiber glass as points and streaks of light. He then combined multiple images into single photos to achieve the "star density" seen in the final images.

Michael Zhang

Starry Night Photographs of Landscapes Covered in Lights

Korean photographer Lee Eunyeol creates beautiful nighttime scenes by installing lights in various landscapes. His artist statement reads,

Starry night expresses private spaces given by night and various emotions that are not able to be defined and described in the space. I’ve chosen analogue type for the expression which attempts to install electric bulbs in an objet to be expressed using back space of night by taking advantage of huge studio. There are two spaces in photographs. One is a space before electric bulbs of familiar landscape are installed and the other is a space after electric bulbs expressed by dispersing personal emotion are installed. Unified light from these two spaces generates a mysterious landscape.

In each of his photos, it almost looks as if the stars have fallen from the sky onto the ground.

Michael Zhang

Canon 60Da Sample Star Photographs

Yesterday Canon announced a new DSLR geared specifically towards taking pictures of stars, the 60Da. For $400 more than the original retail price of the standard 60D, avid astrophotographers can purchase a camera that offers a "modified infrared filter and a low-noise sensor with heightened hydrogen-alpha sensitivity" for shooting "‘red hydrogen emission’ nebulae and other cosmic phenomena". If you have no idea what that means, Canon has helpfully published a number of sample photographs captured with the camera. The side-by-side comparison above shows how the camera's results differ from the standard 60D.

Michael Zhang

55-Hour Exposure of a Tiny Patch of Sky Reveals 200,000 Galaxies

This photo is what you get when you point a massive 4.1 meter telescope (VISTA in Chile) at an unremarkable patch of night sky and capture six thousand separate exposures that provide an effective "shutter speed" of 55 hours. It's an image that contains more than 200,000 individual galaxies, each containing countless stars and planets (to put the image into perspective, the famous Hubble Ultra-Deep Field contains "only" around 10,000 galaxies). And get this: this view only shows a tiny 0.004% of the entire sky!

Michael Zhang

Amateur Astronomer Captures Beautiful Photos of Space from His Front Yard

Reddit user tirceol's father is an amateur astronomer who captures some amazing photographs of space from his front yard by hooking up a camera to his telescope's eyepiece. He uses everything from a webcam to a Meade camera to capture the images, which are sometimes composites created using multiple photos. The above image shows the Andromeda galaxy 2.5 million light years away.

Michael Zhang

Dreamlike Photo Manipulations of Earth and the Starry Night Sky

For his project titled "Unrealistic Scenes", photographer Nathan Spotts composited his own landscape photographs with digital artwork of planets floating in the starry night sky.

I've always been captivated by the beauty of our world, and often dream of the things that lay just beyond what we can see. I wanted to create images of scenes that are not-quite real, but that almost could be.

Michael Zhang

Epic Photos of Lasers Slicing Through the Night Sky

European Southern Observatory photo ambassador Yuri Beletsky shot a series of epic photos showing astronomers shooting powerful laser beams into the night sky. The photo above showing a laser beam pointed at the center of our galaxy was voted as last year's Picture of the Year over at Wikipedia.

Michael Zhang

Stunning Star Trails Photographed from the Australian Outback

Photographer Lincoln Harrison captures jaw-dropping photographs of star trails. Shooting from the Australian outback, he spends up to 15 hours creating each image of the night sky. Shooting with a Nikon D7000, Nikon D3100, and a wide assortment of lenses, Harrison captures a large number of exposures of the foreground and stars separately. He then combines the images (sometimes hundreds of them) into amazing photographs showing the sky dominated by colorful star trails.