Flying by the Seat of Our Plans

  Gear Image above: "How  not  to do it", or "lessons in making a checklist" Photographers can be notorious for their addictions to and fascination with gear.  We will discuss a few must-have items and then some other items that might be beneficial. Camera Everyone's a photographer until...    Image by  Sergio Ochoa  from  Pixabay   It goes without saying that you will need a camera to photograph the night sky.  Or anything for that matter.  In the case of landscape astrophotography, a camera with manual focus and the ability to manually control settings such as shutter speed and ISO are pretty much mandatory.  This knocks most point-and-shoot cameras out of the game, but still leaves lots of options.  Most modern DSLR and mirrorless cameras will work.  So, too, will many Smartphones made in the last 5 or more years (hint: look for "Pro" mode on Samsung).  We can't possibly provide an exhaustive list of camera models with manual settings, so you

  Camera Settings We will start this off with several videos that will cover some camera settings.  We will then discuss each a little bit more after the videos.  Our guidance may differ slightly from what you see in the videos, but seeing it presented in several ways should help make it clear. The first video is the 5-minute version by  Lonely Speck , a site that focuses on astrophotography.  Everything we will tell you and more can be found on that site if you are ever looking for more information.   The next two videos comprise a longer two-part series by photographer  Nick Page .  After you click play on each, you can click the YouTube icon in the player to open it in Youtube and view it larger if you'd like. This final video is an hour-and-a-half long.  Don't think you need to watch it.  But it will cover many basics and Royce Bair does a great job of explaining some compromises that you can make to ensure you get pleasing photos even with limited equipment. Camera Modes M

  Planning Basics of Milky Way Alignment Let's get one thing straight.  We are  IN  the Milky Way.  Therefore, we can always see the Milky Way.  When you hear folks talking about Milky Way "season," they are really referring to the time of year when the Milky Way galactic core is visible at night.  Outside of core season, the core is up during the day and we can't see it.  In our area, it is visible at night from February through October, although it's hardly visible at the tail ends of that range.  The real focus of Milky Way photographers in the Northern Hemisphere is  May-August  when the core is visible for the longest at night. The direction in which we can see the Milky Way changes throughout the year, with SE and S views dominating the early part of the season and S and SW views in the late season.  Similarly, we can see it only during the pre-dawn hours early in the season and only just after dusk in the late season.  "Peak season" in the summer

  Execution - aka "Finally we get to take pictures!" We recommend making a step-by-step checklist and eventually developing your own repeatable workflow for setting up your shots.  Doing so will help everything run smoothly and efficiently and keep you from stressing out about settings or making mistakes that will come back to bite you.  It's really hard to tell when some settings are wrong from the image previews on your camera. Then, if you did make a mistake, you view them on the computer the next day and your heart sinks. To drive this point home, there will be a homework assignment later for exactly this purpose.  We won't go over all the details here, but will suggest some steps to think about. Planning -  Do you have all of the necessary gear from the "Gear" section of this workshop? You don't  need  everything on that list, but make sure you have the camera, tripod, charged battery, memory card in the camera, and a few other essentials.  Then con