There's really nothing like spending time under the magnificent canopy of the night sky.
The scale of it all is just mind-blowing
and the more you learn about it the more amazing it becomes.
They're not just stars,
there are meteors, planets, galaxies, nebulae,
all out there to be discovered.
I'm going to show you a few tips and techniques for getting the most out of your astrophotography,
both for wide-angle starscapes, and deep-sky objects.
I'll be using the Canon EOS Ra with an incredibly sensitive 30 mega-pixel sensor
It's modified infrared filter reveals light at wavelengths most cameras can't detect.
[ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY - WITH FERGUS KENNEDY AND THE CANON EOS Ra]
I've experimented with astrophotography techniques before,
but tonight I'm going to push it to the next level, using the features on the EOS Ra.
My first tip to anyone wanting to try out night sky photography is that careful planning is key.
The first thing I always check is the weather. You don't want cloudy skies because that will obscure the stars,
but also wind can be a problem, shaking the camera when you're doing those long-exposure shots.
You also want to have a look at the phase of the moon. I try to avoid a week either side of full moon
because that really bright moonlight can easily overpower the dim light from the stars.
[CALAR ALTO - SPAIN]
I've come to Calar Alto in Southern Spain.
We're at 2200 meters above sea level here so we are well away from sources of light polution.
and as you can see from the observatories behind me, we've come to the right spot.
I'm scouting around much as I would for any landscape photography,
looking for great composition with some good foreground.
But I need to factor in my astronomical features of interest, in this case the Milky Way core.
The core is the centre of our galaxy and it's the brightest and most colourful part of the Milky Way.
There are plenty of apps out there that use augmented reality
to show you where celestial objects will be at any given time
and don't forget this will vary according to your location and the time of year.
The app's telling me that at 9 o'clock tonight,
the Milky way core is going to be just nicely on the right-hand side of my frame just behind the observatory
so that's just what I'm looking for.
[WIDE-ANGLE MILKY WAY]
There's a little bit of wind just blowing up now so just to keep my tripod really steady
I'm going to put some rocks in it to weigh it down.
The sun's gone down now and thankfully the clouds are clearing fast, so I'm going to try a shot.
Camera settings for shooting the Milky Way as wide-angle are fairly straight-forward.
I'm using the RF 15-35 f2.8 lens
I tend to use manual exposure always
and I'm using manual focus.
Manually focussing on stars can be tricky, but there are digital zoom settings on Live View to help you out.
Both 5x and 30x magnification.
As a starting point I'm going for a shutter speed of around 25 seconds.
Any longer and you start seeing the stars as trails rather than points.
I'm shooting at ISO 3200 which I find is a sweet spot for minimal noise but with enough light-sensitivity.
A wide lens with a maximum aperture of f2.8 or faster, really helps with gathering that precious light.
I'm shooting in raw to maximize the potential for post-processing.
I want to avoid joggling the camera when I press the shutter release
So I can either use a remote control, the Canon Camera Connect app,
or I can just use a 2-second delay on the shutter release.
Here goes, I'm pressing the shutter button.
Now all I have to do is wait while those precious photons fall onto the sensor,
having travelled all that way from outer space.
Right, let's have a look.
Ah, nice.
The Milky Way is really showing up nicely.
I've got an idea now. For a bit of added interest I'm going to put myself in the shot. But I've got to be quick.
Ten-second timer.
Getting some motion into shots is the logical progression
from wide-angle, single-frame astrophotography.
Because it's a slow process, many people aren't aware that owing to the earth's rotation,
the stars appear to move across the sky,
rising in the east and setting in the west, just like the sun.
[TIMELAPSE VIDEO] This can look really cool as a timelapse video clip.
For timelapse videos, your basic camera settings are going to be exactly the same
as the ones we just used for the still images
Now on the EOS Ra, there are two basic ways of making a timelapse video.
You can use the in-built timelapse mode in the camera
and that will produce a ready-made 4K video file.
Or you can use a timer-remote working as an interval timer, to get a series of raw images
that you can work on on your computer, process them, and then put them together as a video file on the computer.
In Timelapse Move mode, I'm using a resolution of 4K, an interval of 30 seconds between shots,
300 shots, and it's now telling me that I'll get 12 seconds of playback
for a recording time of about two and a half hours.
Right, while the timelapse is running I'm going to get some shelter and have a brew.
To add an extra level of movement, I sometimes use a motorized motion-control slider
which will move the camera a meter sideways over the course of a couple of hours and 300 images.
This is a sped-up preview. When I actually do it,
the camera will move this distance over the space of about two hours, taking about 300 shots.
So that'll give me about a ten-second playback with the
Milky Way moving and the camera moving across the ground.
[DEEP-SKY PHOTOGRAPHY] If you really want to delve into the hidden secrets of the Universe
[DEEP-SKY PHOTOGRAPHY] you're going to need a longer lens or a telescope.
For deep-sky astrophotography I'm not so bothered about the landscape features.
I just want to be able to see as much sky as possible, so I've moved location slightly
Using long lenses or telescopes comes with it's own challenges.
Because many of the deep-sky objects are very dim, we have to use long exposure times
and that means that the earth's rotation causes our stars to form into long, streaked lines.
Now to help us with this there's a very clever device called
an equatorial mount. I've got one here.
It's essentially a motorized tripod head that compensates for the Earth's rotation
and should give us nice, crisp, round stars.
It's worth really taking your time with the polar alignment of the equatorial mount, and once you've done that
the camera will track celestial objects very accurately as they move across the sky, giving you pin-sharp images.
In order to set up the equatorial mount perfectly, you need to align it's main axis to the axis of the earth,
and this essentially means you're pointing the axis of rotation of the equatorial mount
directly at the Pole star if you're in the Northern Hemisphere.
You can mount a variety of different lenses on the equatorial mount
depending on the subject matter you're most interested in.
To achieve the maximum magnification I can use a telescope.
The principles are still the same, it's just a very big lens.
I'm using the same equatorial mount and focussing manually.
The EOS Ra fits on the back with an adaptor.
Now it's all calibrated and set up, I'm going to find something exciting.
Lets take a look at the Andromeda Galaxy. This is one of the
most distant objects you can see with the naked eye.
But with the naked eye it just looks like a faint, blurry star.
However, a 60-second exposure with this 400 milimeter lens,
reveals it in it's full glory.
I'm using a remote shutter release and shooting a 60-second exposure at ISO 3200.
Moment of truth, let's see if that worked.
Wow! That is absolutely stunning.
A perfect spiral galaxy.
That is definitely the biggest and furthest object I have ever photographed. It's 2.5 million light-years away.
So we're seeing it as it was 2.5 million years ago
before there were even modern humans on the Earth.
After shooting these light frames, I'm also going to shoot some dark frames with the lens cap on.
Later on I can use specialist astrophotography software to stack a set of light frames
and combine them with the dark frames to enhance image detail and reduce image noise.
I want to look for a nebula now. Nebulae are huge swirling clouds of gas where stars are born.
One of the most impressive nebulae visible at the moment is the Orion Nebula.
Again, I'm going for a 60-second exposure at ISO 3200.
Well that 60-second exposure is now finished and I'm going to take a look at what we've got.
Ah that's fantastic!
You really get a sense that that's a huge, 24 light-year across,
swirling mass of gas. It's the birth place of stars.
We're getting really rich colours out of it, I can see purples and pinks and reds
and of course the EOS Ra is letting about four times more of that infrared light through.
So we're really getting a much richer picture than we would with other similar cameras.
Seeing for myself what's out there and usually hidden to the naked eye,
astrophotography has given me a new perspective on the mysteries of the night sky
and I'm really pleased with the images I've got from the EOS Ra.