How to Photograph the

Milky Way in the UK

how to shoot the milky way…

Around a year ago I took my first astro photo, in Richmond Park. As far as London goes, it’s pretty dark in there, and at 2am one morning, I was pretty happy with the results. Since then, I’ve moved out to Surrey and tried a few more times to shoot the stars. I’ve found loads of stars, but still no Milky Way out here.

This week I went off on a little mission to try and capture the Milky Way on my bike, which was a success. The photos aren’t going to win any awards, but for me it’s a proof of concept, I was genuinely starting to think the Milky Way was a myth which only existed on photoshop. It isn’t, it is real, and you can see it in the UK (and around the world). Now I know it is there and you can see it, I can plan out some better compositions. In theory at least.

There’s a million guides online and on YouTube about this already, but here’s my take on it which I hope might be useful. This is split into two parts, how to take the photo, and then how to edit it.

I also made a little video about the day, mostly to keep me amused on the journey there and back.

HOW TO GET THE SHOT

1. Darkness. You need it to be dark. Really dark. That means zero moonlight, zero sun and as little light pollution as you can find. Take a look on DarkSiteFinder.com to check your local light pollution levels. The shots on this page were all from a Yellow Zone. Green would be better, but anything Orange or Red will be a struggle, I think. As far as moonlight goes, the best night to do this is on a new moon. If you miss the new moon, you need to use the window after the moon has set. This is a few days each month, I use this site to check the timings out TimeAndDate.com. You also need to avoid sunrise ruining things. The official sunrise time on the day of these photos was 4.48am. However, by 3am, the first rays of sun had already started coming over the horizon and after this time, the Milky Way was no longer visible. The shot below was at 2.58am, note how blue the sky is too at this time.

2. No clouds. Check any weather app which shows you % cloud cover. I like Dark Sky, and also double checked it on MetCheck.com. Anything over 20% will probably scupper your chances. Having said that, some low lying cloud, or morning mist/fog can make for an epic photo. Alyn Wallace did an awesome one on YouTube with some mist in the Brecon Beacons (here)

3. A camera. You can even use your phone, but the bigger the sensor the better. I used a Panasonic GH5 which has a micro four thirds sensor, and works just fine.

4. A fast, wide lens. The faster (lowest F-number) the better, as this allows you to get as much light into the sensor as possible. The wider the lens (lowest focal length in mm), the more sky you can fit into the shot. I used a 12mm F2.0 Samyang lens which is a popular astrophotography lens for the micro four thirds market. You can use a kit lens, but they will generally be F4 or so and not quite as good.

5. A tripod. Or something solid to put a camera on. I used a small gorillapod style tripod for these, as I was on my bike and couldn’t carry a ‘proper’ tripod with me. A bigger tripod gives you more options, in particular for height adjustment, but it isn’t crucial, you just need to be creative in how you use it, like below. If you don’t have a tripod, you might be able to get away with using the roof of your car, a fence post or a wall.

6. Camera settings. You need to use the ‘500 rule’ to determine your shutter speed. This is simply dividing 500 by your focal length. My 12mm lens is the equivalent of a 24mm lens on a full frame camera, so 500/24 = 20.83, therefore 20 seconds is the optimum shutter speed. The reason for this is any longer would start to introduce star trails, due to the movement of the stars. The longer, more zoomed, focal lengths show star trails sooner and as a result require faster shutter speeds. Open up the aperture as wide as it will go, for me this was F2, and set manual focus to infinity. For ISO, start at 800, take a picture and see how it looks. The darker the skies, the higher you can push the ISO, to 1600 and possibly 3200. If 800 is too bright, dial it back down to 400. 400 is the highest I could use anywhere in Greater London before the image was overexposed.

7. Download a handy app which shows you where everything is. There’s loads of them, Star Walk 2 and Photo Pills are the two I have. They can both show you a AR overlay of the location of the Milky Way and any other stars/planets/constellations at any time, date and location.

8. Put the camera on a 2 second shutter delay, or use a remote shutter control/the companion app on your phone and start shooting. Have a look, tweak the settings, particularly ISO, and work on the composition. To get the framing right a quick trick is to dial the ISO up really high, like 12,600 and take shutter speed down to 1 or 2 seconds, this means you don’t need to wait 20 seconds to see the framing each time you move the camera.

9. Once you have the framing, focus and settings all dialled in, put your camera on a time lapse or burst mode, and take 8 identical photos. You can stack these together at a later date to create a more detailed and noise-free image. During one of these exposures, get your torch out and shine it on anything in the foreground for a few seconds so that can be lit up in the final image, if you want it to.

In terms of how to take the photo, that is about it for the basics.

THe editing process

Editing these things is a bit of a complex process. I’m terrible at using Photoshop and Lightroom, so this was all a bit of a learning curve for me. I won’t go into details here, as there’s a lot of better guides from people who know more on YouTube - there are two that I used linked at the bottom

The key things to do are

1. Dial up the whites and dial down the blacks, this makes the stars ‘pop’ more

2. Increase the clarity (also called structure in Snapseed)

3. Selectively increase the contrast in and around the Milky Way

4. Dial up some colour within the Milky Way, oranges and teals look good

This works with single images, and stacked ones. If you are looking to stack your images, on PC you can download Sequator to do this for you. I only taught myself this yesterday so don’t feel qualified to teach anyone just yet, but it’s easy enough once you have it downloaded.

YouTube links -

https://youtu.be/qMEdGCpHbFw - Mark Harrison

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TESO5JIomWA - Science Filmmaking

If all the above sounds a bit much, fear not. There’s loads of fun you can have with astrophotography beyond just shooting the Milky Way. You can shoot a star trails photo on any night without clouds, or go and have a look for some planets. I had absolutely no idea at the time, but it turns out in the photos above you can see both Jupiter and Saturn. Pretty cool.

To shoot star trails, you need to take a load of photos from the same position over a period of time. You then use software like Sequator to stack them on top of one another, to give the appearance of light trails which show the path of the stars through the sky.

You can point the camera in any direction for this, but my favourite is to locate the pole star and include that in the frame. There’s a pole star in each hemisphere, and it’s the one that most closely lines up with the rotation of the earth, meaning it basically remains in a fixed position relative to earth and doesn’t move, and all other stars move around it. The North Star in the Northern Hemisphere is pretty easy to locate, follow the plough and it points right towards it.

Once you’ve found the pole star, find something to have in the foreground, and set your camera to take loads of pictures on timelapse mode. The more you take, the better. An hour or two’s worth of pictures is ideal. The below is 75 images taken over a 90 minute period of the grain dryer on the farm I live on.

That was longer than I thought it would be. It is a pretty bottomless pit of opportunity, taking photos of the stars.

If you have any questions, give me a shout, or have a look on YouTube, they probably know a lot more than I do!

The bike ride part of the trip is on Strava if you’re interested - here.