If you’re on a desktop, I recommend clicking on either of these photos to view them larger and scroll between them.
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(Using a crop sensor camera – or cropping your photo in post-processing – does the same thing.) For example, the following photo is taken at 24mm and 20 seconds, and while it has some star movement, it’s difficult to notice at web resolution: NIKON Z7 + NIKKOR Z 24-70mm f/4 S 24mm, ISO 6400, 20 seconds, f/4.0īy comparison, I took the following photo on the same evening at 67mm, all other settings identical: NIKON Z7 + NIKKOR Z 24-70mm f/4 S 67mm, ISO 6400, 20 seconds, f/4.0 I’ve already demonstrated how shutter speed can affect the motion blur in your stars, so let’s take a look at the other two factors: focal length and the direction you’re facing.įocal length matters for an obvious reason: As you zoom in, you magnify everything in your photo, including motion blur. Those are your shutter speed, focal length, and the direction you’re facing. There are three major factors which affect how much motion blur you’ll capture when photographing the stars (assuming a stable tripod and no tracking head). To make it easier to understand those flaws, let’s take a look at the different factors that influence motion blur in astrophotography. However, in practice, both rules have their own flaws. In theory, these rules make it easy to achieve the same preferred balance every time you take a Milky Way photo. That’s where the 500 rule and NPF rule come into play. However, once you’ve figured out your own preferred balance, it’s possible to recreate it perfectly every time you take a Milky Way photo, no matter the other factors at hand (like your focal length or the direction you’re facing). My perspective is this: Every photographer should make a decision about their “preferred balance” between noise and star movement – and I’ll explain more about this decision below. So, what would you say is the optimal balance between motion blur and noise? Is it better to get pinpoint stars even at the expense of noise, or is a longer shutter speed preferable – maybe even longer than in the demonstration above? It’s a dilemma. As a result, it looks cleaner overall, with less noise and fewer discolored pixels. More importantly, the photo taken at 20 seconds captures more than twice as much light as the other photo, resulting in a better signal-to-noise ratio. However, that’s not the biggest difference between the two images. If you look closely (or click to see larger), you can tell that there’s more star movement in the image taken at 20 seconds, while the image at 8 seconds has essentially no motion blur. I used a 14mm ultra-wide lens in both cases: NIKON Z7 14mm and 8 seconds NIKON Z7 14mm and 20 seconds The images below are extreme crops of astrophotography images – the first one captured at 8 seconds, and the second at 20 seconds. In fact, with a typical wide-angle lens, you won’t completely eliminate star movement until you’re at shutter speeds as short as 5 or 10 seconds! The image below, shot at 133 seconds, shows how this blur can get out of control: NIKON Z7 + NIKKOR Z 14-30mm f/4 S 30mm, ISO 1600, 133 seconds, f/4.0Įven at seemingly safe shutter speeds such as 20 or 25 seconds, there will be some blur when you zoom into the photo. Beyond about 30 seconds of exposure, you’ll get noticeable blur in the stars, even with an ultra-wide lens. It can be tough to see that movement with your eyes, but your camera will pick it up. Because of the Earth’s rotation, the stars move surprisingly fast across the night sky.
However, that’s not possible with Milky Way photography.
For example, the landscape photo below is shot at 60 seconds and is plenty sharp: NIKON D780 + VR 100-400mm f/4.5-6.3E 380mm, ISO 100, 60 seconds, f/8.0 With ordinary (daytime) landscape photography, you generally can use any shutter speed you want and get sharp pictures, assuming you’re on a stable tripod and nothing in the scene is moving. Let me start by explaining the problem at hand, and why it’s not as easy to solve as it may seem.