Often when you talk about astrophotography, first things that come to mind are Long Exposure and High ISO. For most of the time this is true but then there are times when you cannot use both at the same time and sometimes you just have to stick to short exposure times. Sometimes, the images produced with a short exposure will not have much detail of the sky, but if you are a dark site, it is sufficient enough to capture those details. I recently visited East Cape lighthouse, which is the easternmost point of New Zealand to capture the milky way rising next to the lighthouse. This was my first time so I did not know what to expect. These beautiful beams going across the sky looked so beautiful and I wanted to capture them with the milky way rising. As usual, I set up my camera to a 20sec exposure, ISO 6400, f/2.8 and not to be surprised but the lighthouse was overexposed and I did not capture any of those beams. A bit disappointed, I tried again with slow exposure and got better. Then I thought, the reason I am not capturing the beams is because, when on […]
How much does the moon affect when capturing the night sky ? Here is a comparison of what the camera sees when the moon is out and when the moon has set. The night / morning i captured this image, It was Waxing Gibbous moon with 95% Illumination. Moonset was in an hour and that is when i started doing a timelapse to capture that smooth transition from bright to dark sky. The images i used in the comparison are straight out of camera (SOOC) without any editing. The botton one is the first frame and the top one is the last frame of the timelapse. Exif: 15sec, ISO 1600, f2.8 at 24mm on Canon 6D
