Astrophotography for beginners: Shooting the Milky Way with the camera you've already got

You don't need an astro setup for a basic Milky Way landscape. A camera with manual controls, a reasonably wide lens and a tripod will get you a long way, and the tripod is the only one of the three you genuinely can't do without. The kit isn't the hard part. The hard part is picking the right night, and then getting four settings right whilst you're standing in the dark with cold hands.

Beginner Milky Way settings: a quick starting point

For a basic wide-angle Milky Way shot, start around here. Every one of these is a starting point rather than a setting to trust, so expect to adjust.

Then zoom right in on the stars on the back of the camera and adjust from what you actually see. The shutter speed in particular isn't a fixed number. It moves with focal length, with sensor resolution, and with where in the sky you're pointing, because stars near the celestial pole move a lot less during an exposure than stars near the equator do.

When to shoot the Milky Way in the UK

The bright galactic core is seasonal from the UK, and for a good chunk of the year it's simply not there to photograph. As a rough guide:

• February to April: visible before dawn
• May to July: visible, but summer darkness becomes limited, especially farther north
• August to October: generally the easiest combination of dark nights and an evening core
• November to January: the core is below the horizon, so it's better for star trails, constellations or aurora

September is the month worth planning around. You get proper darkness without the two in the morning timings that spring demands, and the core is still high enough in the evening to be worth pointing a camera at. Then there are the two things that will actually decide whether you go: cloud and moonlight. A bright moon washes the Milky Way out completely, so check the phase and check when it rises and sets. A moon that sets at midnight still leaves you a perfectly good second half of the night. And check more than one cloud forecast, because they disagree with each other more than you'd think.

What about the aurora?

Treat the aurora as a completely separate thing. It has nothing to do with whether the galactic core is in season, so if a strong alert comes in and the sky is clear, go, even in November when everything above says there's no point. It's the one exception to the calendar.

The four settings to get right

Aperture: open it up

Open the lens as far as it goes. The amount of light reaching the sensor is the whole problem, and aperture is the only one of the four settings that helps with it for free. f/2.8 is comfortable. f/4 still works, and a fast prime at f/1.8 or wider is a genuinely different night. The catch is that plenty of lenses go soft in the corners wide open, or show coma, which gives every star near the edge a little tail. If yours does, stop down slightly and check the corners again. Cleaner corners aren't always worth the light you lose to get them, so have a look at both and decide.

Shutter speed: start shorter than the old 500 rule

The old 500 rule says 500 divided by your focal length is the longest exposure you can use before the stars start to trail. On a modern high-resolution sensor that's optimistic, because you can see trailing today that nobody could see when the rule was written. The more cautious version is 300 instead of 500. At 20mm that puts you around 15 seconds. Then zoom into a corner of the shot on the back of the camera and look at the stars themselves. If they've turned into little ovals rather than points, shorten it. On APS-C, work from the effective focal length rather than the number printed on the lens.

F

Fintan Reckless

Added to Long Exposure

Shot Recipe

10s · ƒ/1.8 · ISO 1600 · 50mm

SONY ILCE-7M4 · SONY FE 50mm F1.8 · Edited in Lightroom Mobile

Whatever number you land on, the only test that counts is your own shot at 100%. Both rules are somewhere to start and neither one is a promise. At 16mm they're about twelve seconds apart, so it's well worth checking rather than guessing.

ISO: probably higher than feels comfortable

ISO 3200 to 6400 is the sensible starting range, and it'll feel far too high if you've spent years keeping ISO down. Push it anyway. Underexposing because a big ISO number makes you nervous is the quickest way to ruin an astro shot, because a dark shot brightened in editing gives you a lot more noise than a properly exposed one taken at a higher ISO. Check the histogram and make sure the data isn't piled up against the left edge.

M

Miroslav Iagunkov

Added to Big Sky

Shot Recipe

10s · ƒ/1.4 · ISO 3200 · 24mm

NIKON D5100 · Edited in darktable

None of this has to start with a current camera. The sensor in an entry level DSLR from 2011 gathers light perfectly well, and it won't be the reason your stars are soft. The reasons will be focus, the moon and the cloud, and not one of those costs anything.

Focus: manual and magnified

This is the one to take your time over, because it's the one thing on this page that can cost you the entire night. Switch to manual focus. Find a bright star or a distant light, put it in live view, magnify it as far as the camera will go, then turn the ring until the point is as small and sharp as you can make it. Once it's right, stop touching the ring. Stick a bit of tape over it if you need to. It sounds over the top, but it beats driving home with a card full of soft stars. And don't trust the infinity mark, which on most lenses isn't quite where infinity actually is. Check the focus again if the temperature drops during the night too, because it can drift as the lens cools.

Give the sky something to sit above

A shot of nothing but stars can be beautiful, but it's the foreground that makes it a photograph. A tree, a ruin, a ridge, a lighthouse, a road, a building or a person gives the shot scale, and scale is what makes a sky feel big. Composition beyond the rule of thirds covers the near, middle and far idea that makes those foregrounds work.

Scout the location in daylight if you possibly can. Composing in proper darkness is much harder than it sounds, and you won't find out the ridge is in the wrong place until you get home. If the foreground is too dark to hold in the same exposure, one option is a separate longer exposure for the land, blended with the sky. That land shot is often easiest during blue hour before the stars come out, with both shots taken from the same tripod position a few minutes apart. If you do that, say so rather than presenting it as one exposure. There's a longer discussion about where that line sits in is editing photos cheating.

Where to go

Light pollution matters far more than whether somewhere has an official dark sky label, and plenty of genuinely dark ground has no label at all. Good UK options include:

• Northumberland
• Galloway
• Exmoor
• Snowdonia
• the Brecon Beacons
• the North York Moors
• parts of mid Wales

Wherever you end up, check a light pollution map before you commit, and think about direction as well as distance. A small town sitting exactly where you want to point the camera will do more damage than a much bigger one behind you.

A practical kit list

• tripod
• red headtorch
• spare batteries
• warm clothes
• a plan for where you're parking and walking
• somebody who knows where you've gone

Turn stabilisation off once the camera's on the tripod, use a two second timer or a remote so you're not shaking it when you press the shutter, and arrive whilst there's still enough light to set everything up without fumbling. The night matters more than the lens. Get the moon, the cloud, the location and the focus right and you're most of the way to a good Milky Way shot on almost any camera. Get one of those four wrong and no lens will save it.

Want somewhere to try it?

Kōlab's Long Exposure Mission takes night shots alongside water, traffic and anything else where the shutter was open long enough to matter. Where people have added their Shot Recipe you get the exposure details next to the shot, which is worth more than any settings table, including the one at the top of this page, because those numbers came off a real night.

Shoot itLandscape

Long Exposure

Stars, aurora, water, traffic. Anything where the shutter was open long enough to matter.

And long exposure water settings is the daytime version of most of this. Same tripod, same discipline about shutter speed, and you can actually see what you're doing.