Shooting & Editing

For most astrophotography, shoot RAW. A RAW file preserves substantially more sensor data and gives you greater control over white balance, shadow recovery, color gradients, noise reduction, and stacking. JPEG is useful when speed, storage, or immediate sharing matters, but its in-camera processing and lossy compression leave less room for correcting faint stars and dark skies.

To stack astrophotography images, capture a consistent series of RAW exposures, remove technically poor frames, calibrate them when appropriate, align the stars, normalize brightness, reject outliers, and combine the accepted frames with an averaging method. The stack can reduce random noise and reveal faint detail, but it cannot repair missed focus, severe trailing, clipped highlights, or inconsistent capture settings.

Category: Shooting & Editing

Edit a Milky Way photo by protecting believable color, smooth tonal transitions, natural star sizes, and a realistic relationship between the sky and foreground. Start with lens corrections and white balance, build contrast gradually, use Dehaze and saturation sparingly, and make local adjustments with soft masks. Judge the result at both full-image view and 100% magnification before exporting.

On a fixed tripod, the longest exposure before stars begin to trail is usually about 8–20 seconds with common wide-angle lenses, but there is no universal safe shutter speed. Focal length, sensor resolution, aperture, sky position, and output size all matter. Use the NPF Rule for a starting point, then confirm sharpness with a magnified test frame.