The Challenges and Delights of Photographing the Night Sky

I love trying to take photos of the night sky. It’s definitely one of the most challenging forms of photography for me, both technically (getting the right exposure, focus, stacking if required etc) and creatively (it’s actually quite hard to compose an interesting shot with the night sky in a lot of the time - just pointing straight up doesn’t usually make for that interesting a photo). I also find it quite a relaxing experience as you spend a lot of time looking at the stars and waiting for long exposures :)

Unfortunately I live in central London at the minute where there aren’t that many opportunities to take night sky photos (but I did have fun trying to capture the ISS going over the City of London), I would love to live somewhere with darker skies!

Here are all of the winning submissions to the IDA's "Capture the Dar" contest:

https://www.darksky.org/winning-submissions-for-capture-the-...

There are a lot of great places in Central/Eastern Oregon for night photography/stargazing:

* The town of Sunriver, just south of Bend just got added as a dark sky community: https://www.eastoregonian.com/news/state/sunriver-designated...

* A trip to the Pine Mountain Observatory is pretty amazing. https://pmo.uoregon.edu/visiting/

* Further out, to the southeast, around Steens Mountain, there is absolutely no one. The Alvord desert in particular .

Of course: don't travel here now, wait until the pandemic is under control.

“We really wanted to accurately represent what someone would see from the ground where they were standing, we didn’t want to misrepresent what would be in the sky above you.” -- strange that shots with trailing stars are allowed in this case, you don't see them with a naked eye.

Here's an interesting blog post that explains how our new phones can now take pretty good night sky photos: https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/experimental-nighttime-pho...