Flying by the Seat of Our Plans

  Introduction to Landscape Astrophotography in Southern Illinois (c) John O'Connell Welcome to the workshop!  We are a group of hobbyist photographers who enjoy photographing nightscapes.  None of us are "experts" or career full-time photographers and all of us are still learning the craft.  There's still a lot we don't know but we are often asked by others how they can also photograph the Milky Way.   We decided to put this event together to help you take your first steps toward capturing the Milky Way.  We look forward to helping you as others have helped us. First, let's meet your instructors: John O'Connell  -  I am a Ph.D. student in Wildlife Ecology at SIU and a hobbyist photographer.  I studied photography in grade school but did not get a digital camera with manual settings until 2018.  Almost immediately, I started trying out astrophotography and I fell in love with being out in the woods at night, enjoying the stars....

  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 came...

  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 phot...

  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....