Amateur photographer Santiago Olay has an interesting day job: he works as a deck officer on a 280m cargo ship. But when he's not busy with his duties, often late at night, he goes out on deck tries to photograph the Milky Way from the middle of the ocean.
Hubble turned 30 years old this month. Well, actually, the space telescope celebrated 30 years in orbit, but either way, NASA took the opportunity to celebrate this milestone by capturing a spectacular, never-before-scene view that they're calling a "tapestry of blazing starbirth."
When most people hear the words "backyard astrophotography", they probably think of photos of the Milky Way, planets, or galaxies, but did you know it's possible to capture some amazing close-up photos of the Sun as an amateur photographer?
This is something I’ve been wanting to attempt for a while, but the skies have not be clear enough to do so. Iowa skies in fact have been almost constantly cloudy of late – or a least when one wants to shoot the moon.
My name is Jason De Freitas (@jase.film on Instagram), and I'm an analog photographer based in Australia. In this article, I'll share how I shoot the Milky Way from my backyard on medium format film.
A couple of days ago, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveiled a plan to help keep the company's thousands of Starlink satellites from becoming a very noticeable blight on the night sky, a complaint we've heard from astronomers and astrophotographers alike.
With many of us stuck in lockdown, quarantine, and self-isolation, I thought I’d share 10 ideas for astrophotography that you can do from home, even if you live in a light-polluted town or city. If there’s one thing that this pandemic has taught us, it’s that we’re all in this together and astrophotography and astronomy only help to solidify that sense of unification.
NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan just shared a photo and message from space to show his appreciation for the brave medical workers who are risking their health to save lives during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
For the past several years, German freelance photographer Nikita Roytman has been working on a personal photo project in which he does landscape astrophotography in the style and mood of the 19th-century Pictorialism movement. The series is titled "Nocturnal Mood Of Time."
As more and more satellites are being launched into space, reflected light from these objects is causing increased sky pollution and issues for astronomers and astrophotographers. Now NASA is asking the public for help in monitoring this growing issue, and all you need to do is shoot smartphone photos of the light streaks in the night sky.
If you're getting into astrophotography, the telescope manufacturer Celestron has published a helpful "celestial calendar" to give you a heads up of notable things you'll see in the night sky through the end of 2020.
Astrophotographer Ian Norman of Lonely Speck recently got his hands on a Google Pixel 4 XL for testing, so he took it out to Joshua Tree National Park to see how well the "Astrophotography Mode" on this smartphone compares to shooting with a "real" camera.
The National Solar Observatory has just released the highest resolution images and video ever taken of the sun's surface. The images, captured with the National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, capture the sun in unprecedented detail, revealing features as small as 18 miles (30km) in size for the first time ever.
If there is a type of photography where a great planning increases your chances of success, that’s Milky Way photography.
Photographers Ian Norman and Diana Southern of Lonely Speck made this helpful video that will teach you the things you need to know to shoot the Milky Way in less than 5 minutes.
Trevor Jones of AstroBackyard recently got his hands on a niche camera that will be extremely interesting to astrophotographers... and just about nobody else: the Canon EOS Ra. In the video above, he takes it out for a test shoot to show off the two features that set this camera apart when it comes to serious night sky shooting.
As we wrap up 2019 and the 50th anniversary of the moon landing in 1969, Sotheby's has one more NASA-themed auction up their sleeve. Launched yesterday, the Space Photography auction includes over 100 original NASA "red number" prints, including some of the most iconic images to come out of the US space program.
Astrophotography is one of the more difficult and expensive genres of photography you can get hooked on, especially if you want to capture deep space imagery. But a new robotic camera/star-tracker/telescope called Stellina wants to change all that.
Singapore is known to be the most light-polluted city on Earth, so it's not exactly the go-to destination for astrophotography. But there are talented astrophotographers working on the island city-state, and this 3-minute documentary titled "Galactic Paint" is about one of them.
Without fanfare or so much as a press release (yet), the Canon EOS Ra camera has officially been released. The specially-designed astrophotography camera is Canon's first full-frame mirrorless camera "dedicated to deep sky and night sky photography."
Kenko Tokina's filter and accessory brand Hoya has released a new filter for night sky photographers. It's called the "Starscape Light Pollution Cut Filter," and it's meant to reduce the yellow and greenish color cast caused by city lights when you're trying to capture the stars.
In August of 2017, the team at Sent Into Space travelled to Fort Laramie, Wyoming to capture something incredible for the BBC. Using a high-altitude weather balloon and a 360° camera array, they captured what they claim is "the world's first hyperlapse of an eclipse from the edge of space."
If the advertised astrophotography capabilities of the Google Pixel 4 enticed you to upgrade from your Pixel 1 or 2, you might be able to do without. The latest Google Camera mod brings this feature and lots more to the older Pixel phones.
Camera maker Ricoh and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have released some beautiful 360° images and video captured with a modified Ricoh Theta from the International Space Station (ISS).
My name is Paul Schmit, and today I want to describe to you the journey that led to the time-blended astrolandscape you see above.
If you were hoping that Sony had finally completely removed the spacial filtering that causes its high-resolution a7R cameras to "eat stars," you're going to be disappointed. According to Jim Kasson, the Sony a7R IV eats stars to about the same degree as the a7R III.
The Royal Observatory Greenwich has revealed the winners of the prestigious Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2019 competition, and as always, the winning images are spectacular.
From 2014 to 2016, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft followed the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67p) around space: collecting scientific data, sending a probe to its surface, and capturing some 400,000 photographs of the comet. This cinematic video was made from those photos.
Two days ago, photographer Paul Schmit captured what he's calling "the most difficult and technical astrolandscape shot I've ever planned and executed." It's an incredible shot, showing the ISS transiting the sunrise in front of some picturesque radio towers atop a mountain peak. This photo was weeks in the making, but Schmit tells PetaPixel he almost missed it.
Let's say I would like to enhance the stars in this Milky Way landscape photo. I could load the image into Camera Raw and add some Clarity at the risk of adding noise and artifacts to the night sky. Another way of doing it could be to use “Select Color Range” combined with a curves or levels adjustment. However, I often find that these methods don't yield satisfactory results.
Did you know that you can capture clearer photos of planets by using a red filter? Photographer Andrew McCarthy captured this view of Saturn from his backyard in Sacramento by doing just that.
Designer and engineer Jordan Vincent has created a set of data visualizations (read: creative infographics) that landscape photographers might find invaluable. Using visitor data from all of the most popular US National Parks, he was able to plot attendance by type of lodging, time of year, and average temperature.
Arlington, Texas, was long in the lead to become my family's vacation destination this summer. But sometime in May, we decided that we wanted to revisit Italy. Last time we didn’t make it to Tuscany, so there was no doubt that it would be the area to stay and explore.
Every mind-blowing deep space photograph captured by the Hubble space telescope that you've ever seen started out black-and-white. So how do we get those amazing technicolor images of the Pillars of Creation or the Bubble Nebula? This short video explains how scientists manage this feat.
Time-lapse photographer Matthew Vandeputte recently captured something truly awesome. While he was sleeping soundly in a cabin somewhere in Utah, the camera he set up earlier that evening captured the moment when a meteor entered the atmosphere and exploded, leaving behind a green trail of dust and ionized gas.
As photographers in the US are gearing up to capture photos of 4th of July fireworks, NASA has released a gorgeous "fireworks" photo of its own. It's a shot of a "the galaxy's biggest ongoing stellar fireworks show" that started 170 years ago.
This month, Hasselblad is celebrating the 50th anniversary of becoming "the first camera on the moon." And in addition to sharing some beautiful photos taken of and with the iconic Hasselblad Data Camera (HDC) and Hasselblad Electric Camera (HEC) used on the moon, they also shared a bit of fascinating history: their original moon landing press release from 1969.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced a new mission that will have the goal of intercepting a comet with a special composite spacecraft in order to shoot photos of it.
After photographing Earth and the Moon from 71 million miles away back in January, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is back again with a new photo of its target asteroid, Bennu, shot from an incredibly close distance of just 0.4 miles (690m) away.
NASA revamped its Image and Video Library website in 2017 to make a massive trove of free imagery available to the public in high resolution. Here's a look at 20 of the most popular shots in NASA's photo collection.
Pillars of Creation is a famous photo of the Eagle Nebula captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Photographer Andrew McCarthy recently captured his own version of the photo from his own backyard in Sacramento, California.
ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst shot this photo from the International Space Station showing what a sunset on Earth looks like from high above in space.
If you were shooting astrophotography over the past couple of nights and noticed a strange line of bright dots traveling across the sky, you might have spotted SpaceX's Starlink satellites. That's what Marco Langbroek caught on camera yesterday in the video above.
NASA astronomers have created an ultimate stitched panorama of galaxies in the night sky using 7,500 individual photos shot through 16 years' worth of exposures using the Hubble Space Telescope. It's called the Hubble Legacy Field.
Living in St. Louis almost my entire life, I was lead to believe the lights of the bustling city were too bright to make seeing stars anywhere nearby impossible. As I grew older and started getting serious about photography, I realized that was correct... kinda.
Can you shoot Milky Way photos using an entry-level crop-sensor DSLR and a basic kit lens? Yes, you can, but there are some tips, tricks, and techniques you can use to improve your results. Photographer Michael Ver Sprill (AKA Milky Way Mike) made this 16-minute video tutorial as a basic guide to doing this.
A team of five French amateur astrophotographers has captured a gorgeous 204-megapixel, 1,060-hour photo of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Jupiter and the Moon were in conjunction this week, appearing close together in the night sky. The event led astrophotography enthusiast Rami Ammoun to create this composite photo showing the relative sizes of the two celestial objects in the sky as seen from Earth.
Due to the rapid growth in population, an increasing percentage of the human population lives in cities and suburbs where the night sky is completely obscured by the artificial lights. Skylines littered with lit skyscrapers reach sky high. An endless river of traffic flashing high beams. And the cities are ever-expanding. It is conceivable that most people have lived without having seen the true natural night sky.
McWay Falls has been a tourist destination for longer than many of us even heard of the place, but it wasn't until 2012 that photographer Steven Christenson really "discovered" the potential of the site at night. Nestled in the rugged and gorgeous part of the California coast better known as Big Sur, McWay Falls enjoys extremely dark skies.