Shooting the Trails - Milky Way

By Lisa Bailey

Where to Start

What is the moon doing? Photo Pill App

We use Photo Pill App to determine the best day to try to shoot with no moonlight

New Moon = No Moon

Calendar is at the Best time for bottom of the is a Moon Screen few days before new moon until a few days after a new moon. What is the weather going to do?

We use the Weather Channel app to select a clear night to shoot

We would aim for Thursday with a backup day of Saturday

We use the MeteoEarth app the day/night of the shoot to determine cloud coverage

This shows the night time Cloud coverage WWW.darkskymap.com Where to shoot to look for Darkest sky in your area

Visibility GC screen

Photo Pill app will help to determine where the Milky Way will be at the location we The dotted line have chosen represents where the Milky Way will Select the Planner button be at the location we determine

The graph at the bottom shows time of day and the relationship of the moon and the Milky Way We use the SkyView app to locate the Milky Way or We use the iPhone Maps North Star in the sky app to mark favorite locations

We are alway looking for the clearest, darkest night sky with great background subjects barns, silos, bridges Equipment I used

Camera - Sony a7ll & a7rlll

Lens - Sony 24-240 Zoom lens Samyang 14mm/2.8 fixed

Tripod, cable release or internal

Flash light, chair, blanket

Dress for the weather, bug spray

Drink, snacks, paper towels Camera Settings

White balance set to Incandescent

Long NR - Off

High ISO NR - Off

Drive mode - single shot Cable Release

Cable release or Intervalometer settings 20-30 second exposure with 1 second in between shots Where is the north star?

Placement of the North Star when shooting star trails determines the direction of your star trails. Shooting with the North Star in you image creates this circle effect. For this picture, I Planes was facing South with the North Star to my back. This creates the two circle effect

Notice the plane streaks in this image? They will be removed in post processing

Star Trail Settings

ISO 800

Aperture F2.8 or as wide open as your lens will go for non detail images

F22 for detail Adds starburst to lights Star Trails How long to shoot?

2 Hours

1 Hour

3 .5 Hours Milky Way Settings

● Aperture wide open F2.8

● Exposure as long as possible without creating star trails 8-20 seconds

● ISO 2000-5000 trying to keep the noise to a minimum Post Processing

I import photos to Lightroom

I develop an image by increasing the Exposure -1.49 and I add Dehaze +.39 Select all photos and hit Sync Setting, then Synchronize Once all the photos have Synced I stack them in Photoshop through Lightroom by going to: Photo Edit in Open as Layers in Photoshop

Depending on the size of the originals I stack 20 - 50 at a time. Sony a7rlll is a 42 megapixel camera so I stack 20 at a time. Once all the images have loaded as a layers I select all the layers: Select first layer Hold down Ctrl Key and Select the last layer

Then I go to the blend mode and select Lighten. You should see the start of a nice trail.

This is when I would look for plane trails and clean them up on the layers they are on. I repeat the process until I have stacked all my photos. This set ended up with 6 sets of 20 images.

I then open all 6 stacked images and stack them one on top of each other.

I start with stack 2 Select all (Ctrl A) and click and drag it on to stack 1, I move the new layer until I see the centered cross hairs as you see here. Then I repeat this step until all stacked photos are stacked into one image. Once again I select all layers then set the blend mode to Lighten.

You will now see your fully stack image.

As you can see I did not clean up my layers as I went.

Plane trail

Helicopter trail To clean up the unwanted plane, satellite or in our case helicopter trails you normally can use the brush tool and black but because I am in the final stacks I sample the sky around the trail. I than paint with a small brush over the trail. Once you turn all your layers back on you can not tell you painted with a slightly different color. All the other layers filled in the space you cleaned up The finished image 120 stacked images Took over an hour To shoot Street Lights

Street lights: Expose your first photo for the church and use it as a mask for the final stacked composite. Dark Buildings

This dark building was light painted by passing headlights.

I used the photo Painted image as a mask and the top photo of my final stacked composite. List of Apps Used Now it is your turn to have fun!