Night Photography Blog — National Parks at Night

Matt Hill

On the Road Again: Announcing Our 2021-22 Workshops

For many reasons, it’s amazing that we are announcing our sixth season. But no matter the reason, it’s a delight to offer you so many opportunities to hone your skills as a night photographer.

Continuing our growth plans for you, we have expanded our options to include something new. You asked for it, and now we are offering two workshops focused solely on learning PhotoPills in the field. And that’s not all! … But I don’t want to ruin the surprise. So let’s get to browsing the dizzying array of destinations for Season 6. Just like the Red Headed Stranger said, we “just can’t wait to get back on the road again..”

Please join us for at a workshop. We look forward to seeing you there.

Use the Waitlist!

As usual, our community has committed very strongly to many of the workshops. Also, eight of these workshops were postponed from 2020 and were already sold out or nearly so. If you see something you really want to attend and there are no tickets now, we urge you to sign up for the waitlist today. On every workshop someone drops out and we ask waitlisters to step up.

The Workshops

Below you can read a little bit about each of the workshops we’ll be running in our sixth season. Click on the photos or the links to read even more.

If you’d like to see a lineup of all the workshops we have scheduled for 2021-22, including updates on how many tickets are available in each, see our Season 6 Workshops page:

OK, onward … Here’s where, like a band of gypsies goin’ down the highway, we’re heading in Season 6. …

Passport Series

These are our signature event workshops, which we hold in national parks. These workshops cater to all levels of night photography. We teach every day, either in the classroom or on field trips, and we shoot every night in beautiful and inspiring places.

We generally run only five Passport Series workshops per year, at least four of them to parks we’ve never run workshops in previously. But this year, that changes. We had three Passport locations we needed to postpone from 2020, and we were disappointed that would supplant some of the new parks we’d been excited to go to. So we said the heck with it, we’ll just go to all the parks we want.

Ready to come with?

Badlands National Park

Nestled in the Northern Great Plains, Badlands National Park comprises 244,000 acres of otherworldly landscapes, grassy prairie and wildlife such as bison, black-footed ferrets, mountain goats and bighorn sheep. We’ll be visiting during the 2021 Perseid meteor shower, and will be focusing on capturing the incredible eroded landscapes with Milky Way, meteors and some moonlight.

Badlands National Park Night Photography Workshop — August 11-16, 2021

 

Everglades National Park

The Everglades is primal, yet inviting. The landscape is raw, yet beautiful. The mosaic of habitats invites photographers to explore and be inspired by wetlands and pinelands, coastal lowlands and freshwater ponds, hardwood hammocks and cypress stands, and vast sawgrass-prairie "rivers of grass." And, of course, the wildlife, from migrating birds to the park's most famous resident, the American alligator. Over them all at night hover a crisp, starry sky and a Milky Way arching from horizon to horizon.

Everglades National Park Night Photography Workshop — April 12-17, 2021

 

Joshua Tree

Joshua Tree National Park encompasses sections of two different deserts—the Mojave and the Colorado—both full of opportunities for remarkable images. We will extensively explore this IDA Dark Sky Park. People come for the trees and bouldering during the day, but at night these features take on a heightened surreality and make for great foreground subjects while the Milky Way stretches across the sky. We will also have special access to Keys Ranch, a photogenic “ghost ranch” that has several buildings, old cars and lots of machinery to light paint. The workshop will feature dark starry skies and Milky Way explorations, as well as a gentle waning moon that we can mix with our light painting to create wonderful night images.

Joshua Tree National Park Night Photography Workshop — May 2-7, 2021

 

North Cascades National Park

In the northern regions of Washington state, some of the least-visited and most beautiful mountains in the U.S. rise dramatically from the landscape under untainted dark skies. An alpine wilderness rife with dramatic peaks, lush forests, placid lakes, roaring waterfalls, curious wildlife and more. We will explore by day and night, visiting and photographing different regions of this peaceful, special place.

North Cascades National Park Night Photography Workshop — August 8-13, 2021

 

Sequoia National Park

The coast redwood may be the tallest tree in the world, but the giant sequoia is the most massive. You’ll be awed by these incredible trees as we spend a week among them in the Sierra Nevada of California. The park’s dark sky festival will be held August 27-29, so come early and join the festivities!

Sequoia National Park Night Photography Workshop — August 29-September 3, 2021

 

Shenandoah National Park

Road-trip through time as we fully immerse ourselves in the scenic Shenandoah area. We’ll visit historic towns like Harpers Ferry and venture deep into the surreal underworld of the Luray Caverns. Then of course there is the 105-mile Skyline Drive, which features 75 beautiful overlooks of the rolling Blue Ridge Mountains. We’ll do some daytime hikes to photograph waterfalls, and nighttime shoots to capture the Milky Way rising above the Appalachians.

Shenandoah National Park Night Photography Workshop — June 26-July 2, 2021

 

Yosemite National Park

While Yosemite doesn’t get the honor of being our first national park, it is this area of vertical granite cliffs, placid meadows and rushing waterfalls that inspired our country’s long history of protecting public lands and irreplaceable scenery. We will explore the valley that inspired America’s greatest idea, particularly at night, when the stars hover over one of the most magnificent landscapes in the world.

Yosemite Valley Night Photography Workshop — October 24-29, 2021

 

Zion National Park

Boasting some of Utah’s most awe-inspiring red-rock peaks, cascading waterfalls and the beautiful Virgin River, Zion National Park and its amazing landforms are a perfect complement to the night sky. We'll explore this epic, iconic landscape under the stars, as well as venture into a nearby ghost town and its 18th century graveyard under the light of a bright gibbous moon.

Zion National Park Night Photography Workshop — March 21-26, 2021

Adventure Series

We started running Adventure Series workshops in 2017. There are amazing places in the U.S. to shoot at night outside of national parks, and we want to visit those too. National monuments, national forests, scenic byways, urban ruins and more.

This year the Adventures will include one of the best ghost towns in the country, two urban locations, a national parkland that’s 469 miles long and only about a mile wide, a legendary cemetery and more.

 

Blue Ridge Parkway

The night is falling, and the road is calling. And we will be there, driving and photographing America’s greatest scenic byway. When the sun fades, we’ll bring our cameras along the 469-mile ribbon of national parkland that stretches atop mountain ridges, through farming communities, past historic cabins and mills, alongside meadows and more, while the stars and moon gently shine on the great blacktop river called Blue Ridge Parkway.

Blue Ridge Parkway Night Photography Road Trip — July 4-10, 2021

 

Mono Lake & Bodie

Explore the northern part of the Eastern Sierra with two nights at the incomparable Bodie ghost town, two nights at Mono Lake, and a one-night foray into the High Sierra of Yosemite National Park. These three vastly different California environs will keep your creative juices flowing in night conditions ranging from dark sky and Milky Way to the gentle light of a first quarter moon.

Mono Lake & Bodie Night Photography Workshop — June 13-18, 2021

 

New York City

New York City means so many things to so many people: illuminating, exhilarating, intense, intoxicating, frantic, alive. Our mission will be to capture the moving energy of the city—the people, the cars, the bridges and the rivers that surround this 8 million-person island. Within the hustle and bustle we’ll explore the inspirational architecture and quieter green spaces that can be found throughout the five boroughs. We will also focus our lenses and attention on many of the National Park Service units that will educate us on the 400 years of American history that laid the foundation of commerce, immigration and equality in our country.

New York City Night Photography Workshop— September 19-24, 2021

 

Sedona

Sedona is a vibrant arts community nestled among some of Arizona’s most beautiful red rock buttes. Sitting at an elevation of 4,350 feet, this desert town is world-famous for its natural beauty and new age vibe. It’s also a perfect destination for night sky enthusiasts as one of America’s IDA International Dark Sky Communities.

Sedona Night Photography Workshop — September 5-10, 2021

 

Sleepy Hollow

Spend three nights photographing in one of the most iconic cemeteries in the world, barely an hour outside of Manhattan in the village of Sleepy Hollow, New York. Expect to be spooked by an abbreviated equestrian with a penchant for drama and overgrown squash. If that sounds like fun, this is the workshop for you.

Sleepy Hollow Night Photography Workshop — November 12-14, 2021

 

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., is truly one of our must-visit destinations. It’s an awe-inspiring city by day or by night. Combining our nation’s history with a myriad of architectural styles, and the many and varied monuments and memorials, makes D.C. a playground for the intellectually curious and visually motivated.

Washington, D.C., Night Photography Tour — April 22-27, 2021

Voyager Series

As much as we love traveling and photographing in our home country, we also endeavor to trek the globe finding beautiful landscapes and fascinating cultures to immerse ourselves in, especially in the dark. Over the next two years (we plan these ones a little further out), we’ll be heading to overseas destinations that range from one of the most enigmatic islands in the oceans to one of the urban art capitals of the world.

Barcelona

Barcelona, Spain’s premier city of culture and art, is rich in delicious dichotomies. From the 13th century gothic Barcelona Cathedral to the 19th century art nouveau masterpiece of the La Sagrada Familia, from the respectful and beautiful graffiti to the citywide art installations—here world-class food, art and architecture are woven together to create one of the most beautiful and photogenic cities in Europe.

Barcelona Day & Night Photography Tour — September 4-9, 2022

 

East Greenland Schooner

Experience the extraordinary scenery and Inuit culture of Greenland’s captivating coastline. This trip along the striking and sparsely populated east coast of Greenland will begin and end in the village of Kulusuk, but everything in between will truly be an exploration. Glacier hikes, stand-up paddleboarding, sea kayaking, and of course photography––you’ll have the opportunity to do all of these and more on one of our grandest adventures yet.

East Greenland Schooner Day & Night Photography Tour — September 16-26, 2021

 

Easter Island

Few places on Earth are as mysterious or compelling as Easter Island. The giant stone figures known as Moai oversee this remote island 2,200 miles off the coast of Chile. Most of Rapa Nui, as it’s known to the locals, is a national park. Not only is it hard to get to Easter Island, it is notoriously difficult to access the park after the sun goes down. But we will be taking a lucky group of fellow night photographers on this rare opportunity of spending an unforgettable week with the Moai.

Easter Island Day & Night Photography Tour — January 25-February 1, 2021

 

Lofoten Islands 2022

This will be a winter workshop focused on photographing the rugged snow-covered mountain islands, dramatic beaches, northern lights, pristine fisherman’s huts and untouched beauty of this remote and breathtaking region of the world. March is a perfect time to visit Lofoten—the milder winter temperatures make the overall experience ideal for catching the auroras over a snow-globe winterscape.

Lofoten Islands Day & Night Photography Tour — March 18-26, 2022

 

Scotland: Orkney Islands

During our tour we’ll explore the remarkable ways that past and present collide at the crossroads of the Celtic and Viking worlds. A cluster of 5,000-year-old archeological sites on the archipelago are collectively designated as a World Heritage Site called The Heart of Neolithic Orkney. The main sites consist of two major circles of standing stones, a massive chambered cairn, and the remains of an ancient village that was exposed on a clifftop during a storm in the 19th century. Orcadians live with these monuments in their backyards—these relics are part of the cultural, as well as physical, landscape that influences the way the locals interact with the world.

Scotland: Orkney Islands Day & Night Photography Tour —May 23-30, 2021

Skills Series

All of the above workshops and tours focus a lot on exploration. Our Skills Series events focus on learning something specific—still in an inspiring place, but we focus on a specific skill set. This year we have a couple of workshops based in amazing cities and focused on post-processing, as well as a couple in national parks to learn how to use the best scouting app in the business, PhotoPills.

 

PhotoPills: Acadia

PhotoPills: Joshua Tree

Long before the photograph comes the idea. And with PhotoPills, the ideas have no bounds. During five days and nights of learning, scouting in two amazing national parks—Acadia and Joshua Tree—we’ll explore the ins and outs of one of the most powerful tools a photographer can keep in their pocket. Learn to plan and capture the Milky Way, sunsets, moonrises, star points, star trails and more.

PhotoPills Bootcamp: Acadia — October 2-7, 2021
PhotoPills Bootcamp: Joshua Tree — May 9-14, 2021

 

Post-Processing: San Francisco

Post-Processing: Seattle

You’ve spent a lot of time building your camera skills and honing your photographic vision. Now it’s time to take it to the next level. Post-processing has become an integral part of nearly every discipline of photography. Just as the black and white photographers of the 20th century were able to creatively interpret their work in the darkroom, we can now use modern technology to enhance our photos, and even to create images that were impossible only a few short years ago. Join us in either of two amazing cities—San Francisco or Seattle—to learn how to master the tools of post-production.

Post-Processing Intensive: San Francisco — February 21-26, 2021
Post-Processing Intensive: Seattle — July 26-31, 2021

Where Will You Seize the Night With Us?

Thank you all for being part of our community of eager explorers and lifelong learners, and for continuing to use us as a whetstone for your creative skills. We appreciate you so very much.

Here’s to seeing you on the road again, very soon!

Matt Hill is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. See more about his photography, art, workshops and writing at MattHillArt.com. Follow Matt on Twitter Instagram Facebook.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

A Better Intervalometer: The Phottix Aion

Most night photographers struggle with the most basic requirement to make long exposures: an intervalometer. I believe I’ve found the solution: the Phottix Aion.

The Phottix Aion.

What is an intervalometer?

The object of my study (some call it an obsession) is a tool called an intervalometer, which is essentially an external cable release on steroids.

Example of a simple external shutter release.

A standard external cable release is simply a switch. Press the button, the shutter opens. Let go, it closes. Sometimes it has a lock that can hold that button down.

What an external cable release cannot do is execute timed intervals between exposures. This, along with programming shutter speeds, is necessary for goals such as star-trail stacking and time-lapses. For whatever the purpose, an intervalometer can make multiple programmed exposures.

Note: Some cameras now include this as a firmware feature. Hooray for progress! If yours does, then you may not need an external intervalometer. But before deciding, test it out. Many internal intervalometers can be confounding to configure, and most can’t overcome the camera’s native maximum shutter speed, which for most cameras is way too short for long exposures.

The Problems I Have With Intervalometers

So why do I care about this hard-to-pronounce camera accessory? It affects me when it does not work as expected. And it affects all our workshop attendees in the same manner. And it affects all night photographers in general. Here is a list of common issues:

The Cable Connection Breaks

This applies only to wired intervalometers, which is what most people own. Where the camera cable meets the body of the intervalometer, there is a “stress relief” molded into the cable. Despite that, all the rigors this connection goes through—bending back and forth during normal use, living all wrapped up in a backpack or bag, hanging off a camera or tripod—will eventually break the solder inside.

Then when we are inevitably someplace remote and interesting, suddenly the intervalometer stops firing the camera, and we start trying to hold the cable at just the right angle to reseal the connection and make it work. Which is does … sometimes.

Vello dedicated wired Shutterboss for Nikon DC2 connection.

The Cable Connection is For Only One Camera

Again, this applies only to wired intervalometers. You are locked into the cable that works with your camera. Which is good—unless you switch systems, upgrade to a new model or rent a different body.

I understand this makes it easier for manufacturers to sell to people looking for something specific, to not waste resources and to give people only what they need. But not all manufacturers make it easy to order a replacement cable or a different cable.

The Backlight Lasts Only 10 Seconds

This is exactly one second less than it takes to make an adjustment. Just kidding. But seriously, the light should last longer. Ten seconds is hardly ever long enough to adjust a programmed setting, and never long enough to create one.

The Status Indicator Light Ruins Photographs

The little red light blinks to tell you an exposure or sequence is running, which is a nice gesture. But if the cable twists forward to where your lens is pointing, you can ruin your image and others’ around you. Yes, that little LED can shed enough light to be picked up on a long exposure.

There Can be Too Many Modes

This is particularly true of wireless intervalometers. Many that I’ve used default to a mode that has nothing to do with night photography. Right?! How dare they pander to daytime photography. Geesh.

Joking aside, you may have to cycle through modes to get to the classic “intervalometer mode” we require for night photography. Every … time … you … turn … it … on.

I do not Want to Use My Phone

There are some very interesting exposure controllers out there that require your phone’s computing power to perform programmed exposures or sequences. I have tried many, and none are for me. I want to be “present” during my night photography experience, I want to preserve my night vision, and I want to save my phone battery.

The Phottix Aion transmitter (left) and receiver.

So What is the Best Option?

After much testing and firsthand experience with many, many manufacturers’ intervalometers—both in my own photography and by playing with what people bring to workshops—I affirm that the Phottix Aion is the best intervalometer you can buy. Here’s what I love about it:

You Can Set Exposure Durations in Tenths of Seconds

This matters when you are using the NPF Rule to determine star-point exposures, which can be very precise. Let’s say your NPF exposure is 11.72 seconds. With a standard intervalometer, you would have to round down to 11 seconds. Seven-tenths of a second doesn’t sound like much, but in this case it’s nearly 10 percent of the exposure. With the Aion, you can open the shutter for 11.7 seconds.

NPF exposures (seen here in PhotoPills) are almost always precise into the tenths (and hundredths) of seconds.

It Comes with all The cables for Nikon, Canon and Sony

Well, not all the cables, but if you have a camera that uses one of these connections, you are covered:

  • Canon 2.5mm sub-mini

  • Canon 3-pin

  • Nikon 10-pin

  • Nikon DC-2

  • Sony Multi-Terminal

(Sorry, Fuji, Pentax and Olympus owners.)

The Aion connectors.

It Remembers Its Mode

If you turn the Aion off and on, it will return to the last mode you used. Yay for efficiency and time management!

The Crosspad Buttons are Separated

One of the most frustrating things to watch is when someone new to night photography is trying to make an adjustment to the exposure or interval settings on a traditional intervalometer. A big part of the issue is that due to the control button’s one-piece construction, the difference between side-to-side and top-to-bottom adjustments is so minute that photographers easily change to the next setting instead of changing the value. Heck, it happens to me too. And I hate it.

The Aion fixed that—thank you! It features four separate buttons for up, down, right and left.

Most intervalometers have one main “arrows” button to press multiple directions; the Aion has the improved feature of four different arrow buttons, so you always know what direction you’re pressing.

You Can Use it Wirelessly or Wired

This is not a new feature to wireless intervalometers. But I still enjoy it.

Here are some examples of when it’s ideal to have a wireless trigger that is also an intervalometer:

Group shots that you’re in. (I’m sitting in the middle. Hi!)

Creative portraits that require many tries to execute.

Light painting far from the camera with short exposures.

The Countdown Time Shows Quantity of Exposures Remaining

This is not very important, but is good to understand. The Vello Shutterboss shows the exposure number you are currently on. The Phottix Aion shows how many remain. I prefer the latter. It lets me know not how much work is done, but rather how much work is left to go.

You Can Disconnect the Pieces

The issue with stressing the connection by continually wrapping up the cable and eventually breaking it is completely avoided. How? With the Aion, you can disconnect the cable when stowing the units. That alone will guarantee many more nights of photographing under the stars.

The cable plug pulls out, eliminating the biggest stress point of traditional intervalometers.

Selfies are Easier

Since you have a wireless transmitter with on-screen countdowns, making self-portraits under the stars, or including yourself as a human element in the scene, is easy. Doing so wirelessly is also safer than running back and forth to and from the camera in darkness.

Half-Press for Focus

The large button is for normal “Bulb” exposures: Press and hold to open the shutter then release to close it. But the button also has a two-stage functionality similar to the shutter release on your camera. You can half-press the button to autofocus. Combined with the wireless capability, you could focus on yourself in the scene!

What Could be Better

As much as I love the Aion, I’d love to see a few improvements in the next model. A few things I can nitpick:

  1. It doesn’t include batteries. Four AAAs are inexpensive and easy to source. Not all wireless receivers use standard batteries.

  2. The Mode button is where the backlight button is on other intervalometers. I am still re-training my fingers to find the backlight button without having to look for it, or to return to the “delay” or top-most mode.

  3. The crosspad buttons are smaller than traditional intervalometers. And the keys are slick and rounded. (But the separated buttons are still better than the single crosspad button of other intervalometers.)

Video

If you’re more of a watch-what-I-mean kind of person, please enjoy this video comparison:

(And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel!)

Wrapping Up

The Phottix Aion is a big improvement over our previous intervalometer of choice, the Vello Shutterboss II.

Yes, the Aion costs nearly twice as much (actually on par with the Vello Wireless Shutterboss). So you can choose to carry two wired Shutterboss units for the same money, or one Aion that is likely to be more reliable.

Sadly, this is not the perfect solution. That still does not exist. I am not saying this to throw shade on any manufacturers. Night photography, despite its popularity, is still a niche. And perhaps the opportunity to make the right tool is too small for many manufacturers.

(If you are a manufacturer reading this post and want to collaborate with NPAN to make the ideal intervalometer, we are ready. In fact, we have begun the long-term process of defining the ideal solution. Ping us to start the conversation.)

For all of you night photographers out there, we hope this helps you make better star-point stacks, star trails, time-lapses, portraits, and whatever genius and creative ideas you realize with your cameras.

Let us know what you think in the comments or on our Facebook page, especially if you own or an Aion.

Matt Hill is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. See more about his photography, art, workshops and writing at MattHillArt.com. Follow Matt on Twitter Instagram Facebook.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Great Balls of Fire, Part 3: How to Process a Meteor Shower Radiant

Welcome to Part 3 of our journey through the how-to of photographing meteor showers:

  1. “Using PhotoPills to Scout Meteor Showers,” by Chris Nicholson

  2. “How to Photograph a Meteor Shower,” by Matt Hill

  3. “How to Process a Meteor Shower Radiant,” by Matt Hill

All of this, plus a guide to gear and a guide to shoot locations, is contained in our brand new PDF e-guide, Great Balls of Fire: A Guide to Photographing Meteor Showers. To download the whole e-guide, click here:

Meteor Showers Cover.jpg

So … You’re creating a meteor shower photograph. You’ve scouted in PhotoPills. You’ve shot the shower. Now you have hundreds of images. How do we make that cool composite where all the meteors appear to come from a particular origin in the sky?

Find Your Background

Start by editing one image. It should be the best image. This will be the “base” sky that all the meteors get stacked onto later.

Identify the frame that has the most aesthetically pleasing sky. In my example from Great Sand Dunes National Park, the Milky Way is arcing through the composition. Since there were clouds in all the images, I chose the one that I believed has the best-looking clouds and with the Milky Way leading to the upper right corner of the frame (Figure 1). I marked this image in Lightroom with a Pick flag and a Green color label to make it easy to find later.

Figure 1. I like these clouds the best.

Perform your edits to taste. I made my edits to accentuate the galaxy gliding across the sky. But then consider backing those off those edits a bit to de-accentuate the sky. In other words, make the sky darker than you normally would, because you will be masking in meteors, and they need to “pop.”

Sync your Develop settings across all the dark-sky images in your meteor series (Figure 2). If you shot into moonrise or sunrise, process those separately for the foreground (ignoring the sky, which you will eventually mask out).

Figure 2.

Don’t forget to spot/clone out any planes or satellites from your main image (but don’t worry about any of the other images—that would be a waste of time).

Identifying Sky Objects

Here’s a cheat sheet on how to identify the four primary “streak” objects you’ll find in your night sky images. If you want to dive even deeper into this, see my blog post “How to tell the Difference Between Planes, Satellites and Meteors.”

Plane trails are straight or curved (or both), are usually accompanied by dots (from the wingtip lights) at regular intervals, and they traverse many frames.

Iridium satellite flares usually taper in/out like a meteor, but traverse more than one frame because they move slower than a meteor. Also, they may not have any notable color. These are becoming considerably less frequent.

A satellite or the International Space Station creates a straight, very thin line that traverses many frames. No color/tint.

A meteor appears in only one frame (unless you’re unlucky for it to happen during an interval between frames, which would create a gap in its trail). It can be many different colors or gradients—yellow, red, green, blue. Also will vary greatly in size and intensity.

Find Your Meteors

You could export all the images as layers in Photoshop, but imagine how much that would choke your computer. I have over 300 images from that shoot. It’s easier to export and work with only the ones with meteors. So first spend some time in Lightroom to identify every image that has an actual meteor in it. Some tips:

  • Zoom in and around each frame.

  • Toggle back and forth between pairs of images while looking for differences. You will eventually train your eyes to see the meteors.

  • Make a few passes through the whole series. Do your first pass with the zoom at “to fit screen” to find the dramatic, obvious meteors. Then do a few more subsequent passes at the “fill” zoom setting on different areas of the sky.

Finding all those meteors is time-consuming—possibly the most time-consuming part of this post-processing project. And it’s taxing on your eyes. But persevere! The end is in sight.

As I found mine, I used a Yellow color label (number 7 on the keyboard, Figure 3) to mark each one. I found only 23 frames with meteors out of 325 images. Yes—only 7 percent of my frames captured meteors. And I was running an exposure sequence for over two hours. Lesson: Maximize your chances; keep that sequence going as long as you can.

Figure 3. My meteor images, yellow-coded.

Also note that each meteor shower has a different potential yield for meteors per hour. (This is part of the info that PhotoPills provides.) This may vary by location, and will certainly vary by the amount of moonlight in the sky. And even if you’re supposed to be witnessing massive activity, your camera angle may not capture what does end up being visible, despite your best scouting efforts. So stay positive, be smart and work with what you get.

Find Your Foreground

You may have shot several options to use as your foreground—some long exposures at a low ISO, some with light painting, some with moonlight, etc. Look through and pick your favorite. I knew pretty much exactly what I was going to use, because I love my first photo from when the moon rose over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Let’s prep the foreground image to make it easier to blend with the other frames.

For my sky image, I had deliberately crushed the blacks and shadows with a gradient mask and range mask to make the ground as dark as possible (Figure 4, left). Why? Because it would be easier to use a selection tool later in Photoshop.

For my foreground image, I did the opposite: I pushed up the whites and highlights in a gradient mask and range mask, and I carefully edited the edge so as not to blur the ground/sky transition (Figure 4, right). I also imagined what this should look like and made the ground edit believable—not too bright, not too warm.

Figure 4. Crushed blacks in the foreground (left) and crushed highlights in the sky (right), to make masking them out easier in Photoshop later.

Stacking Your Assets

Use the Attribute filter in Lightroom to find all the Yellow-coded photos (or whatever attribute you chose). To do that, press Command-F (Mac) or Control-F (PC), then select Attribute and click on the Yellow rectangle. Select all the Yellow images in Grid view. Cancel out of the filter by clicking None at the top, then also select the edited versions of your background sky image and your foreground/landscape image.

With all those frames selected, from the Lightroom menu choose Edit > Open as Layers in Photoshop (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Less Ideal, But Less Computer-Stressing Method

If your computer can handle the task, load the images into Photoshop using the method I described above. It will result in the highest-quality final image, albeit one that’s huge (in this case, a 7 GB PSB file). But if you have an older computer or not a lot of scratch-disk space, you may want to instead export all these frames as JPGs (full-resolution) and then load those files into Photoshop layers using Adobe Bridge. You could also use a Photoshop script to load the JPGs as layers. In Photoshop, choose File > Scripts > Load Files into Stack.

Both of those options will stress the computer less, but because JPGs are lossy, this option will be less flexible to edit later.

Editing Your Layers

Time to plug in that Wacom tablet if you have one! Although, a mouse is fine. I actually found it very easy to use a mouse for this with click/shift-click straight-line painting.

Power user tips:

  • Save every 10 minutes. Just do it. Losing detailed work will make you cry.

  • This will be huge file. Probably bigger than 2 GB, which is the size limit for a PSD. Therefore, you will want to save as a PSB, which is Photoshop’s native large-file format. If you want to be able to see your PSB in Lightroom, make sure you’ve updated your Creative Cloud software since February 2020.

  • Give your eyes a rest. Look out the window now and then.

  • Organize your layers. Make a layer group (essentially a folder for layers) to hold all the meteor images, and name it “Meteors.” Name your sky layer “Sky” and your foreground layer “Ground.” This will eliminate future confusion.

  • Lock your Sky and Ground layers to avoid accidental edits. (Press Control-/, or click the “Lock all” icon above the layers.)

Masking

For each meteor layer, the only image data you want is the meteor itself. Why don’t you want the rest of the sky? Because the stars will be in a different place than in your Sky layer. The sky has only one Vega, etc., and we want to keep it that way. So on each meteor layer, we need to mask out everything except that streak of light.

Here are your steps (for tool locations, see Figure 6):

  1. Turn off your Sky and Ground layers.

  2. Turn off all the meteor layers except the one you are working on.

  3. Click the Add Layer Mask button at the bottom of the Layers panel.

  4. Press D to reset the foreground color to black and the background color to white.

  5. Press B to enable the Brush tool.

  6. Press the bracket keys to change the size of the brush to just a tad wider than the widest part of the meteor streak. [ makes the brush smaller and ] makes the brush bigger.

  7. Click on the thumbnail for the layer mask (not on the thumbnail for the image layer).

  8. Zoom in so the meteor’s path fills your screen.

  9. Now paint out the meteor on the mask. I know it’s counterintuitive. Trust me. (You can use the shift-click trick since meteors burn in a straight line: Click once at one end of the meteor streak, then hold Shift on your keyboard and click once at the end of the streak. )

  10. Use the brush sizing and feathering to finesse your masking.

  11. When you think you have successfully painted out the meteor, invert the layer mask by pressing Command-I (Mac) or Control-I (PC), or from the menu select Image > Adjustments > Invert. I prefer the keyboard shortcut because I use it to flip back and forth to finesse the masking. Try it—most likely you’ll see how convenient it is, too.

  12. Look around the whole layer—there may be more than one meteor in each.

  13. Optional: Make laser-beam noises when you find another meteor. I did. It’s fun.

Figure 6.

Rinse and repeat! Go back to step 2 and do this for every meteor layer you have in the Photoshop document (Figure 7).

Figure 7. All the meteors I found, masked in.

Making the Radiant

It’s magic time!

Alignment

The radiant of the meteor shower is always in motion, as seen from our perspective on earth. Keep this in mind. When you composed, you knew if it was in the frame or not and made good decisions about placement.

In my example, the Perseids were easy since they are so close to Polaris that they do not appear to move much. The Geminids, however, are so far up in the sky you’re not likely to have land and sky in the same composition, even with a 14mm lens. So they will come into your frame from the edge and point to a place not in clear view. And alignment will not be exact.

You’ll see this happen in our next steps:

  1. Select all the layers by pressing Command-Option-A (Mac) or Control-Alt-A (PC), or shift-click the first and last layer.

  2. On any layer with the Eyeball turned on, Control-click (Mac) or right-click (PC) on the eyeball, then select Show/Hide all other layers.

  3. Near the top of the Layers panel, change the Blend Mode to Lighten. You’ll now see the brightest elements of every layer blended together—the stars, the lit foreground and the meteor streaks.

And see? It’s likely that not all your meteors are pointing to the same place.

Note: Any meteor that does not line up with the origin (in this case, the constellation Perseus) is called a “sporadic” (Figure 8). Don’t let those meteors make you think you did anything wrong. They happen. (More on Sporadic meteors here.)

Figure 8. A sporadic.

Because everything in the universe is in motion, to adjust for this perception error, our layers also need to be “put into motion.”  Specifically, we have to rotate each meteor layer, ideally around a visual anchor in the Sky layer. Lucky for me, Polaris is in my scene. Easy peasy. (If Polaris isn’t in your frame, you’ll just need to do a little more work by eye to line up the rotation correctly.)

If the Radiant is in Your Frame

The most surefire way to get all the meteors pointing toward the radiant is if you actually have the radiant in your composition. (See Figure 9 for tool locations.)

  1. Invert the layer mask.

  2. Set the layer to 50 percent opacity.

  3. Enter the Free Transform mode (Edit > Free Transform or Command/Control-T).

  4. Move the center point of the Transform bounding box to just inside Polaris (north)

  5. Rotate the layer. You can do this by clicking and dragging outside the corner of the Transform box. But you can control things easier this way: Locate the Rotate box at the top of the screen, and click into it. Now press the up/down-arrow keys until the star points align.

  6. When aligned, press Enter twice to lock in the rotation angle as well as your Transform adjustment.

  7. Set the layer opacity back to 100 percent.

  8. Invert the layer mask again.

  9. Repeat for each meteor layer.

Figure 9.

If that’s a bit too tedious for you, there are two faster (if less precise) ways to accomplish the same task:

  1. Use Free Transform when zoomed to fit to screen, move the center point roughly into position without zooming all the way in, and rotate each layer using your eyeballs.

  2. Evaluate if you want to do this at all. My first gut reaction without rotating the layers was, “This looks great!” I turned off all the sporadic meteors and called it a day. But then I went back and did things “right” for the sake of perfecting the image for this blog post.

If the Radiant is not in Your Frame

Simply rotate and align each layer until all of the meteors appear to be originating from the same point. Sometimes I put a piece of tape on the wall behind the monitor and eyeball the lines so they all line up with that point. Reminds me of art school and learning about vanishing points.

Dealing with Sporadics

The sporadics might be bothering you. After all, you went through all this work to create an image where scores of meteors are pointing toward the same point in space, just to have a few rogues that point wherever they want (Figure 10).

Figure 10: Sporadic meteors circled in red. Note they do not point toward Perseus. I removed them.

You have a few options:

  • If you only want a “clean” radiant, turn off the layers with the sporadics.

  • If you don’t care, leave them on.

  • Free transform and rotate/move the sporadics so they look as if they came from the radiant.

It’s your choice. But my choice is not to pretend they all were radiant meteors if they were not. I chose to turn those layers off.

Along the same lines, you may choose to move some meteors that cross over or are too near to each other. It’s your fiction … or not. I chose to rotate each layer to honor the origin of the radiant.

Mask in the Ground and Sky

Your base images (which should be the lowest layers in your Photoshop file) for the sky and ground need to be masked over the meteor stack. Here’s how I did mine:

Photoshop is getting very good at auto-detecting with the Quick Selection tool (W). I set Point Sample to a tolerance of 2, and checked Anti-Alias and Contiguous. Then I clicked and dragged on the sky/ground (both of which we crushed in Lightroom earlier to make the unwanted pixels similar, specifically to ease the masking process now).

Figure 11.

When I had the selection I wanted (Figure 11), I added a layer mask and inverted it. Voila! Sky and Ground perfection (Figure 12).

Figure 12. The Sky and Ground layers blended, minus the stacked meteors.

After all this work (and pausing to save many times!), you have a Photoshop document with lots of layers, and it might look something like this:

Figure 13. Final image. Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado. Nikon D750 with a Zeiss Distagon 15mm f/2.8 lens. 17 images at 22 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400, plus a single foreground exposure at 382 seconds, ISO 2000.

Your final steps are to:

  1. Save it once more (Command/Control-S).

  2. Flatten the layers by choosing Layer > Flatten Image from the menu.

  3. From the Menu choose File > Save As and then choose Photoshop from the Format menu to save this file as a PSD. This process should automatically save the file and return it to Lightroom. If the PSD does not appear back in Lightroom, do the following: Navigate to the Library Module. Right-click on the folder containing the meteor images, and choose Synchronize. When prompted, choose to import the new image into Lightroom.

  4. Discard the giant layered PSD/PSB when you are totally comfortable that you are done editing it. I suggest giving it at least a week. (If you have giant hard drives and don’t care about gigabytes, feel free to skip this step.)

Wrapping Up

At this point, do whatever you do to celebrate. It’s a major accomplishment—to plan, to shoot and to edit a meteor shower radiant. Good on ya.

And please—please, please, please—if you go through all of this work, share what you’ve done. We’d love to see it. Post in the comments below or on our Facebook page.

Now be sure to download the e-book, Great Balls of Fire: A Guide to Photographing Meteor Showers, which includes all three blog posts, plus a gear guide and a location guide!

Matt Hill is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. See more about his photography, art, workshops and writing at MattHillArt.com. Follow Matt on Twitter Instagram Facebook.

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Great Balls of Fire, Part 2: How to Photograph a Meteor Shower

Welcome to Part 2 of our three-day journey through the how-to of photographing meteor showers:

  1. “Using PhotoPills to Scout Meteor Showers,” by Chris Nicholson

  2. “How to Photograph a Meteor Shower,” by Matt Hill

  3. “How to Process a Meteor Shower Radiant,” by Matt Hill

All of this, plus a guide to gear and a guide to shoot locations, is contained in our brand new PDF e-guide, Great Balls of Fire: A Guide to Photographing Meteor Showers. To download the whole e-guide, click here:

Meteor Showers Cover.jpg

How to Photograph a Meteor Shower

Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado. Nikon D750 with a Zeiss Distagon 15mm f/2.8 lens. 17 images at 22 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400, plus a single foreground exposure at 382 seconds, ISO 2000.

It’s amazing to capture a meteor. An accomplishment that makes most of us say, “Yeah!” and fist-pump in the air. But you know what’s even better? Lots of meteors. And all of them zooming out of one spot in the sky.

One meteor can often be problematic, compositionally. One looks like just a bright streak going through the frame, brighter than a plane trail, usually not in a pleasing spot along a line of thirds or along a swirl of the golden spiral. But many meteors all emanating from one place in the heavens? Wow!

So get your biggest memory card(s) and format them, because this could be a lot of photos!

Let’s assume:

  • you know where the radiant is, because you used PhotoPills

  • you choose a night that has favorable sky conditions (I love the Wunderground app)

Let’s also assume you have the following:

  • a high ISO-capable DSLR or mirrorless camera

  • freshly charged batteries or an external battery pack such as the TetherTools Case Relay

  • a reliable tripod

  • an intervalometer or a camera with one built in

You are now ready.

The Scenario

Our Great Sand Dunes group shooting the shooting stars.

Location

I am going to use a workshop shoot in Great Sand Dunes National Park to illustrate the process. The park is north of Alamosa, Colorado, which unfortunately is a source of light pollution. But the northern view into the crook of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is not only ripe with dark skies, but also offers a beautiful visual contrast between the top of the dunes at 8,660 feet and the mountains at 12,000.

Having visited Great Sand Dunes twice before, I had performed a fair amount of both daytime and nighttime scouting. The first time I failed, and the second I fared much better. This would be the third trip, and the shot I had in mind was rather epic.

Meteor Shower

The peak of the Perseid Meteor Shower on the overnight of August 12 to 13, 2017.

Sky Conditions

We had peak darkness from about 9:30 p.m. until just before 11 p.m. when the moon started to rise behind the mountains and brighten the sky.

Challenges

Ascending 600 feet of sand dunes at 8,000 feet of elevation, with gear, to achieve the view of the mountains over the dunes. Plus the patience to wait out the meteors.

A lucky first shot. Nikon D750 with a Zeiss Distagon 15mm f/2.8 lens. 22 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400.

Setting Up

I chose a 15mm lens and a vertical orientation for the camera to keep the composition ratio to one-third landscape/dunes and two-thirds sky.

When deciding on a composition, it’s important to confirm the location of the meteor radiant—the place in the sky where all the meteors appear to originate from. The radiant is always near a constellation (not by magic—only because human imagination has seen and named a lot of constellations, so there’s always one nearby). A meteor shower is named for the constellation near its radiant. The Perseids are named such because the meteors appear to originate from the constellation Perseus.

In 2017 PhotoPills didn’t have the Meteor Showers feature, so we did it the old fashioned way: We used an astronomy app to spot Perseus and to see how it would appear to move during the shoot. We set up our cameras facing the direction of the meteor shower radiant, keeping in mind that it would move through the frame (like the rest of the night sky) over the course of the evening.

In Chris’ post yesterday, he walked through how we would have used PhotoPills to plan this photo. In short, here’s the info I would have loved to have at our fingertips that night three years ago:

From left to right: Path of the meteor radiant, plus moon shadow angles and times. The same, plus the Milky Way. Nearing the end of a usable dark sky. Moonrise—the end of the shoot … or not?

I placed the radiant near the center of my composition. Again, constellations appear to move during the night, which means the radiant center travels through your composition. So definitely plan for that movement. If you are not careful, the radiant may drift out of your frame. Fortunately, the Perseids are located not too far from Polaris. So, from the earthbound point of view, everything was pretty much rotating around a close fixed point, making shooting (and later, post-processing) easier.

I chose to include a generous portion of sky to maximize meteor captures, plus some of the landscape for context. My framing deliberately included some featureless foreground: the utterly dark dunes. We encouraged everyone in the workshop shooting with us to stay behind a line in the sand (so to speak) so as not to get footprints in others’ foregrounds.

The foreground is dark—but we’ll deal with that later.

You may ask, “If the foreground is dark, why are you including so much of it?” Well, it’s awfully hard to see meteors when the moon is in the sky. That causes an opposite problem: dark landscapes. But we still, ideally, want our images to have artful foreground that provides both context and rich details.

How do we do that? We have a few choices:

  1. Set up during the end of the day and shoot some twilight images. Then, do not move your camera. Not a millimeter. When darkness descends, shoot your meteor shower images and blend them with your daylit foreground in post.

  2. Light paint your foreground for the beginning and end frames of your meteor shower sequence. In post, blend your best light painting with your meteor radiant.

  3. Wait for the moon to scoot around and light up the landscape from a right angle. This is what I chose, and I urged the attendees to do this too. It takes patience. But knowing your goal helps.

No matter what, be sure to give your skies some context and plan for your foreground to be composed and lit well.

Setting Up the Rest

OK. Next we do the bread-and-butter night photography stuff:

  1. Focus.

  2. Compose.

  3. Perform a high ISO test.

  4. Check everything at 100 percent on the back of your camera. Carefully. Especially look at your focus. Four times. Not joking.

  5. Make sure your camera is set to capture in RAW.

  6. Choose your color balance.

  7. Lock down everything on your tripod.

  8. Put a fresh battery in your camera, or plug in to an external battery.

  9. Determine a good shutter speed using the NPF Rule. (More on that later.)

  10. Choose an ISO that complements the scene and your camera. For my Nikon Z 6, it’s usually ISO 6400, but I know Gabe really digs pushing that camera to 12,800.

  11. Shoot as wide open as your lens permits without coma.

  12. Connect your intervalometer and set its program as needed. Your interval between images should be 1 second, which is as short as almost any intervalometer can effectively go.

Shooting for Sharp Stars

Why is the shutter speed so important? You want to have exposure times that create star points, not short star smudges. Your sky should be tack-sharp, so I suggest calculating a shutter speed using the NPF Rule.

But when you do, calculate the ideal NPF exposure in PhotoPills using “Default,” but not “Accurate.” For example, these days I often shoot with a Nikon Z 6 and a Laowa 15mm f/2.8 lens. When I run that combination through the NPF calculator, the “Default” shutter speed is 18.62 seconds, while “Accurate” is 9.31 seconds.

A 9.31-second exposure will create amazingly sharp starts, but it is also short enough to increase the chance of cutting off meter tails. 9.31 seconds + 1 second delay in the intervalometer = 10.31-second exposure cycles. That means the shutter will be closed for 9.7 percent of the total exposure time of the final composite image.

An 18.62-second exposure is more likely to capture a meteor in its entirety—its blackout time during intervals will account for only 5.2 percent of the cumulative exposure of the series. I like those odds better.

NPF Rule shutter speeds for the Nikon Z 6 when used with a Laowa 15mm f/2.8 lens, at the “Default” (left) and “Accurate” (right) settings. (Forget about the 500 Rule. It’s two generations old—enough to consider obsolete.)

You might decide that you don’t mind missing a few meteors because you want to make a magnificent mural print for your wall and the pointier stars will look better when blown up. I would agree. But photography is always a game of deciding which variables to adjust to match your goals. My goal was maximum meteor strikes.

Also consider this: You might capture only 10, 20 or 40 meteors in hundreds of photos over a few hours of shooting. My final in this example has only 16 meteors originating from the radiant. Shooting at 9.31 seconds, with more frequent 1-second intervals, may have reduced that count by quite a few.

The Shoot

So now what?

Set your intervalometer (or camera software or app) to start a sequence of images that begins right after twilight ends (or right when the meteor shower starts to pick up). Also, base your start time around when the moon might be rising or setting, if applicable. In my case, in Great Sand Dunes, I wanted to keep shooting until a little after the moon rose at 11:04 p.m.

If you want to run your exposures until dawn, I suggest returning to your camera during twilight to adjust your exposures manually as the sun approaches the horizon, because they will change quickly. But consider this: Why should the foreground look like daytime when meteors are visible only on the darkest of nights?

Go! Let it rip. Don’t move the camera. Don’t walk in front of it. Maybe light paint the first few exposures. But then sit back (maybe on a portable chair) and enjoy the meteor shower with your naked eyes or go for a safe hike in the darkness.

Waiting out the long series of exposures.

Waiting out the long series of exposures.

At Great Sand Dunes, I let the exposures run for just over two hours. Yup. Made 325 RAW files. For a wedding photographer, that’s no big deal, but for a night photographer, that might usually be three or four night’s work.

I put together the 325 images in a time lapse, so you can see (in an accelerated way) how the meteor shower looked in person:

Patience pays off. Moonlight sculpts the dunes for my lit-foreground frame. Nikon D750 with a Zeiss Distagon 15mm f/2.8 lens. 382 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 2000.

Foreground Exposure

My final step was to expose for the moonlit foreground and mix in some light painting.

I wanted the moon to be scraping over the dunes perpendicular to my scene. As soon as the moon was about to do what I wanted to capture, I stopped the intervalometer to cease the meteor series. I quickly shot another high ISO test to determine a good exposure, then dropped down to ISO 2000 and made a 382-second frame for a higher-quality image of the sand.

I didn’t choose to make an even longer, even higher-quality exposure because the moon, and thus the shadows, were moving quickly, which made the dunes look flat. I could have also walked into or around the scene and performed some artful light painting to accent the landscape, but I liked how the moonlight looked, so I packed up the setup and moved on for the night.

Post-Production

Congratulations! You photographed a whole meteor shower! Believe it or not, that was the easy part. Now you have to process it. … Buckle up! Tomorrow we go to the digital darkroom.

Now move on to “How to Process a Meteor Shower Radiant.” And be sure to download the e-book, Great Balls of Fire: A Guide to Photographing Meteor Showers.

Matt Hill is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. See more about his photography, art, workshops and writing at MattHillArt.com. Follow Matt on Twitter Instagram Facebook.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Getting the Best Star Points for Astro Landscapes: How to Test Lenses for Coma

It’s time to talk about something scary that hides in dark corners. It’s an unwanted guest, and has ruined many star parties. The regret comes in the morning, and in the form of a lens aberration called “coma.”

The technical term is comatic aberration. This is not to be confused with chromatic aberration. They sound very similar. Chromatic aberration is color fringing at high-contrast edges in an image, and it’s quite easy to correct in post-processing.

Comatic aberration, on the other hand, has to do with a different type of lens artifact. In night photography terms, coma is when stars start elongating or distorting to look like spaceships or seagulls (Figure 1)—not because of problems with an exposure, but because of quirks in how a lens works. Coma ruins star points, but it’s also a problem with star trails. Imagine: That odd shape drags across the sky, making large, fat trails that can be distracting in a composition (Figure 2).

Figure 1. See the odd shapes of the stars? That’s coma. The shapes can also present as “wings” or diamonds. Fuji X-T1 with 7Artisans 7.5mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. 58 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400.

Figure 2. Coma also presents a problem with trails, which will be fatter than normal. Fuji X-T1 with 7.5mm 7Artisans Fisyeve f/2.8 lens. 90-minute stack, f/2.8, ISO 6400.

While not impossible to work with in post, coma is tedious to repair (or to clone out, or to paint out with special brushes). To be frank, I’d rather re-shoot with a better aperture or lens than correct a photo full of coma.

Why Does Coma Matter?

When I got serious about astro-landscape photography, I paid attention to certain things that I believed directly affect the quality of the final image. Coma is one of those things that matters to me. And I know my colleagues at National Parks at Night also care about it at the same level. In fact, Lance Keimig was who first taught me about it.

Now I am at a crossroads. As I move fully to mirrorless on my Nikon Z 6, I want to replace all my F-mount lenses with native Z-mount equivalents. So I am testing a bunch of lenses to see exactly what I want to be carrying in my backpack. As I test, my primary criterion is—you guessed it—coma.

Coma most often occurs on fast, wide lenses. The most common culprits are lenses with apertures of f/2.8 or wider, which are exactly the lenses that are best for astro-landscape photography.

Milky Way over Bryce Canyon National Park, with very little coma. Nikon D750 with a Viltrox 20mm f/1.8 MF lens. Foreground exposure created by blending 25 frames in Starry Landscape Stacker, each shot at 13 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400. Foreground exposure 323 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 1600. Blended in Photoshop.

When coma occurs, it is strongest at the corners of the image. It appears less so at the top and side edges, and is unlikely to (but could) appear at the center.

The easiest way to reduce or eliminate coma is to stop down the lens. The aberration is likely to sufficiently diminish by f/5.6. But that’s an aperture that’s not usually wide enough to create shutter speeds that can capture sharp stars in an astro-landscape image.

So the better alternative is to have a lens that doesn’t need to be stopped down to begin with. All lenses have coma to some degree, but some lenses are certainly better than others. In night photography, we want fast ultrawide lenses in which coma disappears or is nearly nonexistent at f/2.8. Why? Because that’s what’s best for star-point and Milky Way photos.

This is the reason we love the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8. It exhibits almost no coma when shot wide open. This is also why we love the Irix 15mm f/2.4. It too exhibits almost no discernible coma when shot at f/2.8. Both of these lenses are extraordinary.

Unfortunately, my goals for my new kit take me away from these dear optics. While both of those brands are working on Z-mount versions of those lenses, neither has a release date. Also, I do not want to carry an FTZ adapter. While it does allow any F-mount lens to be mounted to a Z-series camera, those lenses tend to be heavier than Z-mounts. Lighter, more compact lenses are part of why I wanted to go mirrorless to begin with. So onward I must journey.

I strive to make the highest-quality photographs I can. I do some printing now, and I plan on doing even more this winter. So when I make 20-inch, 30-inch or 40-inch prints, I want them to evoke the feelings I had when visiting the gorgeous destinations where I made the images.

Night photography is a process of acknowledging which variables are hard boundaries and which are acceptable areas for compromise. Coma is one place I will not compromise. Therefore, I test all the lenses I consider for purchase. I suggest you do the same. To that end, below I will reveal how I recently tested four lenses, and will discuss how to interpret the results.

Preparing a Lens Test

This part is really simple. Grab a notebook and a pen. Draw a grid/table. At the left, write the full apertures of your lenses as rows going downward. Across the top, make a column header for each lens you are testing.

Note: Yes, for sure it’s good to run these tests on lenses you’re thinking of buying. Rent one, borrow one from a friend, whatever. But it’s also good to test lenses you already own, so you know where and when they begin to fail you. Then you can compensate in the field when needed.

My notes from this test. Why am I making notes during the test rather than just checking metadata in Lightroom? Because none of the ultrawide lenses I was testing have electronic contacts, which means the metadata does not contain either the make/model of the lens nor the aperture used in the exposure.

These are the four lenses I recently tested:

  1. Samyang MF 14mm f/2.8 for Nikon Z

  2. Venus Optics Laowa 15mm f/2 FE Zero-D for Nikon Z

  3. Viltrox 20mm f/1.8 MF for Nikon Z

  4. ZEISS Distagon T* 15mm f/2.8 ZF.2 for Nikon F

B&H Photo kindly sent me the Samyang and Laowa for evaluation. I tested these against my tried-and-true Zeiss Distagon. I own the Viltrox, having chosen it already to replace my 35mm Sigma Art as my standard wide lens and for shooting panos.

Performing the Coma Lens Test in the Field

I chose a new moon, and I drove west for 15 minutes out of Catskill, New York, where farmland leaves broad, open, dark rural skies. This combination of choices gave me the maximum number of stars to work with. (If you run your test during a different moon phase, do so a couple of hours before the moon rises or a couple of hours after it sets. You want to be able to see even the faintest of stars.)

Step 1: Nail the focus.

I set up a quarter-mile away from a traffic light so that I could use it to zoom in and really hit the perfect focus. For reference, I took a shot of each perfect focus. See below.

To ensure I ended up with stars that didn’t blur due to movement, I used the following settings: ISO 6400 and the proper NPF calculation for sharp star points (using the Accurate setting in the PhotoPills calculator, as opposed to Default).

Step 2: Make a test shot at each aperture up to about f/5.6.

As noted earlier, this is where coma disappears on most lenses anyway. Moreover, you’re highly unlikely to be shooting star photos at smaller apertures than this.

Step 3: Take Good Notes.

As you make your test images, look at them on the back of your LCD and note the filename in your notebook grid.

OK! That’s all you really need to do in the field. But I suggest that you really take the lenses for a drive. Shoot some star stacks, some star trails, car trails, etc. Get cozy with the lens in general.

Examining the Coma Lens Tests Results

At 800 percent zoom, look at the shape of the stars.

  • acceptable/ideal = round and crisp

  • unacceptable/comatic = irregular shapes that look like birds, flying saucers, donuts, cigars, etc.

It’s that simple.

Wanna pixel-peep? Download the full-resolution JPGs from my test:

The results of my lens test?

  1. I am purchasing the Laowa 15mm f/2 Z-mount and selling my Zeiss Distagon F-mount. Surprisingly, the Laowa has a little less coma than the Zeiss at f/2.8. And the former feels like half the size. That’s a double win.

  2. The Samyang has coma even at f/5.6, so it’s not a good lens for astro-landscape photography.

  3. The Viltrox 20mm f/1.8 is a keeper! No coma at f/2.8. Perfect for star points. It’s heavy, but the focus is smooth and it’s sharp as heck.

Now I can rest easy knowing that my first two native Z-mount lenses are friendly to night photography.

I hope this helps you both understand what coma is, and how to perform your own reliable tests. Now go and test your lenses. Share the results in the comments below or on our Facebook page

Matt Hill is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. See more about his photography, art, workshops and writing at MattHillArt.com. Follow Matt on Twitter Instagram Facebook.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT