Shooting the Milky Way Galaxy

Capturing the ethereal beauty of the Milky Way galaxy is an awe-inspiring experience. The gleaming stars against the darkness evoke wonder. After adjusting camera settings, the Milky Way unveils its intricate details. Each image captures the universe's vastness and whispers a tale of cosmic enchantment.

I have been wanting to get a good shot of the Milky Way for awhile now, but I live in the Maryland suburbs with too much light pollution. This past weekend my family planned a camping trip to Chincoteague to celebrate my daughter’s pre-K graduation, so I decided to give it a shot. It was actually pretty easy, and did not require expensive specialized equipment, or for me to miss any sleep. For this shot I used my Canon R6 Mark II, 28-70mm F2L zoom lens, remote release, and a tripod. Below is my workflow.

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1) Seek out a dark area, or try to find an area that is dark to the south. You can use a resource like this - https://darksitefinder.com/maps/world.html#6/36.879/-85.840 When I took this shot I was in a green area, but the ocean was to the south. Try to avoid a place where people will be, especially if those people are not doing exactly the same thing you are doing. You will get annoyed by people getting in your shot and shining their white lights everywhere.

2) Once you decide where to go, get the app photo pills. https://www.photopills.com/ This app costs $10 and it is worth it! A little bit of a learning curve to it, but it will help you setup and plan your shoot in advance. You can use the app to check the location of the moon and milky way at your site and pick the best time to shoot the Milky Way. You don’t want to shoot when a full moon(or even a 1/4 moon) is in the sky, and this app will let you check that, even months out in advance.

3) Check the weather forecast and make sure the skies will be clear when you plan to take your shot.

4) Visit the site during the day before your shoot. This is where the photo pills app really shines… Go into the augmented reality mode, and forward it to the time you plan to take your shot. You can then see on your phone screen where the milky way will be in the sky. Walk around and try to pick a shooting position that will incorporate some interesting foreground elements into the shot. You may find that you adjust your shooting time to get the milky way in a better position based on your location and foreground choices. In this case I wanted the dirt road and the Assateague Lighthouse to be strong elements in the shot.

5) Go back to your spot just before its time to shoot and get setup. I did not have to stay up crazy late to get this shot, it was taken at 10:08 pm local time. If you saw any hazards during your daytime visit, be sure to account for those traveling to the location at night.

6) You are going to need to use full manual mode on your camera. Switch auto focus off. Easiest thing to do is find a bright star in the sky, and adjust the focus manually until that star appears as small as possible. Zoom in on the back screen to help if you can. Then put your camera on a tripod, get your composition(remember why you visited during the day?), and don’t touch the focus for the rest of the night. You can arrive early at blue hour and take a foreground shot, and then later blend it in photoshop. Personally I found with the light from the lighthouse and sequator that I did not need to do that.

7) For my shot I used 28mm, F2, 5 sec shutter, and 6400 ISO. Photo Pills has a “spot stars” feature where you input your equipment, and it will give you the recommended shutter speed to eliminate star trails, and get the stars as sharp as possible. If you take too long of an exposure, you will get star trails and the stars will not be sharp. Its important to figure this out! For example, if I wanted to use my 24-70mm F2.8 lens, It tells me the longest recommended exposure time is 11 seconds. You can use my settings above, but you will need to adjust if you don’t have the exact same equipment as me. Use the exposure triangle to make your adjustments equivalent. Expect to use an ISO of at least 6400. Really, the most important thing is to not blow out your image and loose detail.

8) I setup my camera to shoot on a timer, and then take 10 consecutive shots. So with a 5 second shutter speed, I had 50 seconds of exposure total. below is what one of those exposures looked like straight out of the camera. You can see there really is not much detail. You will need to post process these images to bring out the detail in the Milky Way.

Unedited raw file straight out of camera, shot on a Canon R6 Mark II with a 28-70mm F2L lens, at ISO 6400, F2, and 5 second exposure at 10:08 pm on 8/12/2023.

9) This is where the magic of the free app “Sequator” comes in. https://sites.google.com/view/sequator/download I do believe its a windows only app, sorry mac users, but I believe there is similar app for the Mac but it is not free. Sequator will take the 10 images(it could be more or less, I just used 10 because that was the max I could do with the built in counter) and stack and align the images. Noise is random, so when multiple images are stacked the noise will different for each image, while the stars stay the same. So it is able to filter out alot of the noise you get when shooting under exposed at higher ISO.

Sequator has an option to freeze the foreground, and I highly recommend doing that. Here’s a link to a tutorial - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODMMVrL8OrI&t=13s Then you don’t need to take a separate foreground shot.

10) Open a post processing program like lightroom, photoshop, or digital photo professional plus and edit your image to bring out the Milky Way. Its really all about increasing the contrast, clarity, and expanding the tonal range. I ended up raising the exposure, contrast, clarity, saturation, and abit of dehaze to get to the final image.