Category Archives: Astrophotography

The Canon EOS R8, released in April 2023, is Canon’s lightest full-frame mirrorless camera to date. Sporting a 24.2MP CMOS image sensor and a Digic X processor, this unassuming camera is surprisingly adept at all kinds of photography and even makes short work of astrophotography.

Thanks to its full-frame 35mm image sensor and excellent on-board processing there’s minimal high ISO noise despite having a massive range of up to ISO 102,400 natively, expanding to 204,800 with a boost. While it’s not the first camera we’d recommend for night photography we were impressed with our test results.

© bojanstory via Getty Images
Space.com’s astrophoto of the month celebrates some of the best space photos submitted by our readers.

Each month Space.com chooses an “astrophoto of the month” to celebrate and acknowledge the stunning images captured by our readers. 

For your chance to be considered, please send your send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to [email protected]. From the full moon to deep-space targets, the Starlink satellite train to planetary conjunctions, we want to see it all! 

If you’re inspired by these photos and are thinking about purchasing some new kit, our guides to the best telescopes and best binoculars are a great place to start.

Our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography, as well as our Astrophotography for beginners guides, will also help you choose the right gear to capture your next stunning space photo.  

Related: What you can see in the night sky tonight (maps)  

For any successful astrophotography venture, preparation is key. It’s important to understand what you can see in the night sky and when. Here are some helpful guides designed to help you get the most out of your skywatching experience.  

Skywatching guides

Astrophotography guides

Astrophoto of the month

June 2023

Our astrophoto of the month is this stunning image of the new supernova SN 2023ixf in the Pinwheel Galaxy, also known as Messier 101 (M101), captured by astrophotographer R. Mark Lilienthal from Constance Bay, Ontario, Canada. 

SN 2023ixf has been making headlines since it first burst into view on May 19, 2023, when supernova hunter Koichi Itagaki from Yamagata, Japan spotted a new bright spot in the Pinwheel Galaxy. The supernova was confirmed the following day by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) in California.

Lilienthal started astrophotography almost two years ago and in that time has upgraded his equipment and learned stacking and processing, using AstroPixelProcessor as the main workhorse.

“This past Christmas, I acquired a previously enjoyed Sky-Watcher Equinox 80ED Pro refractor but took another couple of months to buy the iOptron CEM26 mount,” Lilienthal told Space.com in an email.

It took several attempts to get the perfect setup that produced the stunning image of the M101 supernova. 

“Frustration with finding an elegant solution to drive all of this led me finally to acquire a previously enjoyed ZWO ASI533mc Pro camera, after which I went the last mile and bought a ZWO ASIAir to drive everything (and a ZWO ASI120mm guide camera). Of course, through most of this time, our weather here had been less than ideal for astrophotography!”

Lilienthal’s “first light” image with this new setup was of M101 on May 14. 

“Everything worked well…although I did only get about 45 minutes worth of subs. I was still quite proud — round, sharp stars and good detail in the galaxy’s arms,” Lilienthal wrote.

But as everyone who dabbles in astrophotography knows, things aren’t always straightforward. 

“With 22 May promising to be the next clear night, I was looking forward to getting another hour’s worth or more of subs to add to the previous,” Lilienthal wrote.

“I even resolved the meridian cross which had stopped me on the 14th. Of course, that wasn’t to be. By May 22, SN2023ixf was shining in all its glory, the result of which I’ve shared.”

“Suffice it to say that I was extremely pleased with the result.”

Do you have a space photo you’d like to share with us? Email photo(s), comments, and your name and location to [email protected].

Each month Space.com chooses an “astrophoto of the month” to celebrate and acknowledge the stunning images captured by our readers. 

For your chance to be considered, please send your send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to [email protected]. From the full moon to deep-space targets, the Starlink satellite train to planetary conjunctions, we want to see it all! 

© Jason Parnell-Brookes
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PhotoPills is a map, a calculator and a celestial almanac rolled into one and much more besides. Photos of the moon setting behind the Statue of Liberty, the Milky Way arching across the night sky between two rock formations and a composite showing the stages of a solar eclipse; all of these photos of alignments have something in common — they were likely planned using PhotoPills. Designed to solve specific problems (hence the name ‘pills’) for photographers of all kinds, PhotoPills is particularly useful for astrophotographers and night photographers.

Although astrophotographers largely use it to find the right shooting spot on the correct date and at the right time to capture a specific event, PhotoPills is also helpful for finding the settings to take the shot, such as deciding which lens to use and calculating the exposure settings. It’s also a place to learn new techniques and to share images with a community of other users.

We review why you need to get PhotoPills if you’re serious about learning or becoming better at, astrophotography.

PhotoPills app review

PhotoPills app: Pricing and Subscription

• Originally launched in 2013
• Available for Android and iOS
• Costs from $10.99 (£9.49)

First released in 2013 and relaunched as PhotoPills 2.0 in 2015 for iOS and for Android in 2017, PhotoPills was created by a company of developers based in Menorca, Spain. Available for both Android ($10.99/£9.49) and iOS ($10.99/£10.99), they continue to add new and exciting features.

PhotoPills app: User Interface

• Simple grid design
• Steep learning curve
• No landscape mode for smartphones

PhotoPills has a simple grid-based user interface that’s clear and easy to use, though it only works in portrait mode on a smartphone. There are three pages to flick through on the main hub page, but it’s the default page ‘Pills’ that has all the essential apps. Front and center are ‘Planner’, ‘Sun’ and ‘Moon’, which give the astrophotographer everything they need to plan specific shots.

‘Planner’ shows where on the horizon the sun, moon and Milky Way will set. The app can use your device’s GPS location, but it’s easy enough to drag the pin to where you’ll be on a future date for a specific shot.

The map in ‘Planner’ is customizable, too, with options to swap between Google, Apple and OpenStreetMap maps and between satellite, terrain and other styles. The dedicated Sun and Moon pages are much simpler, merely showing a text-based chronology for any particular day to include the exact rise and set times, the precise times of ‘golden hour’ and ‘blue hour’ as well as nautical twilight and the all-important astronomical twilight. There’s also a simple moon phase calculator, which makes it obvious which 10 nights of the month the night sky will be the darkest.

Elsewhere the app has a bunch of calculators that are similarly easy to use, typically on one page, and provide instant results. For most of them, the user needs to enter their exact camera and/or lens — searchable from an archive — to receive automatic recommendations for settings. These calculators are a huge time-saver and, crucially, they’re very easy to use, with all kinds of parameters that you can tweak for the perfect result.

On either side of the main Pills page are pages for both My Stuff and Academy. The former has a Plan section that details the shooting locations and positions you’ve previously researched (a Point of Interest can be shared, accompanied by a small KMZ file to export into Google Earth). 

The Academy page brings you the community aspect of PhotoPills, which comprises a library of Points of Interest (a map infested with spectacular points of interest from which to take photographs, though not specifically geared towards astrophotographers) and an Awards section that highlights inspirational shots from the PhotoPills community. The fact that you’ll find plenty of recently viral astrophotography shots here is proof that PhotoPills is used by many of the best astrophotographers around today.

PhotoPills app: Key Features

• Sun, moon and Milky Way almanac
• Night AR mode
• Exposure calculator

There’s so much in PhotoPills that it can take many months, and even years, to fully learn to use it properly, much like a camera. The main feature is Planner, which shows you at a glance the exact sightline, azimuth and altitude for the sun and the moon. This allows photographers to shoot them, particularly at sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset, from any location on a map. The date and time can be easily changed, but sensibly not by accident since that menu is hidden in the ‘More’ section.

Previously saved plans can be loaded, as can specific points of interest across the globe from a database, while places you choose can also be saved for later (it’s even possible to load a location using a geotagged photo on your phone). For instance, say there’s a total solar eclipse coming up; it’s possible to plan exactly where to stand to have the eclipsed sun just above a mountain (thus avoiding a catastrophic mistake and making a beautiful image possible) and save that information for when it’s needed. In theory, you could skip through the next few years of solar eclipses, lunar eclipses and monthly rises of the full moon and prepare for them all in one long PhotoPills session.

Two other really useful tools, both for when you’re planning shots and for when you’re out in the field shooting on location, are AR and Night AR, which overlay the paths of the sun and the moon on the sky. The latter adds the Milky Way’s exact position, which changes according to the time as you move a finger across the screen. As visualizations go, these are simple but slick. Perhaps the only feature it lacks that would be useful, particularly by day, is a user-friendly AR visualization of the landscape and how the shadows will change upon it (something its rival The Photographer’s Ephemeris offers). 

Other features for general photography include Exposure and DoF (Depth of Field) calculators, alongside a Time-Lapse mode to aid in the calculation of the total number of photos required and the interval between them to produce a time-lapse of a specific length.

PhotoPills app: Astrophotography Features

• Planner has exhaustive features
• Night AR mode for the galactic center
• Works with solar and lunar eclipses

Although its data on the exact timings of ‘golden hour’ and ‘blue hour’ make PhotoPills an excellent tool for all kinds of photographers, it’s of most use if you want to capture sunrises and sunsets, moonrises and moonsets, meteor showers, star-trails, solar and lunar eclipses and the Milky Way.

A typical use-case for astrophotography — both wide-field and close-up — is the appearance of the galactic core, the part of the Milky Way richest in star fields and nebulas. Using Planner, it’s possible to pinpoint a location and get sightlines to the galactic center — the brightest part of the Milky Way, which is best photographed in spring in the northern hemisphere. At the top of the screen are the exact times for the rise and set of whichever object you choose, and as you fast-forward time the screen turns blue as twilight begins. Night AR mode then allows you to see where the galactic core will be as the night wears on.

You can go a little deeper by dropping a black pin on your target subject, which will give you the distance to it, the altitude difference and its azimuth position. That means that you can plan a photo with the Sagittarius cloud right behind, say, an observatory on a mountain ridge — and you can get a shooting schedule down to the minute. If you remember that azimuth reading and use a stargazing app (with an azimuth grid displayed), you’ll be able to find out exactly which stars, clusters and nebulas will be above your subject, and at what time.

It can get complicated, but most users are only going to need to know about finding their position and reading when and where the Milky Way will rise and set, when astronomical twilight will be and when the moon will rise. The main problem is that with so many different sightlines for the moon, sun and galaxy the screen can look really cluttered. We’re also not convinced that ‘Visibility GC’ for the galactic core is easy for beginners to understand. A third issue is that the app’s indication of the brightness of the galactic core doesn’t take into account the position of moonrise and moonset, only the phase of the moon.

Once in the field, PhotoPills continued to be extremely useful, mostly for its exposure calculator, which we used to calculate the correct exposure for the foreground. Rather usefully, it presents both ‘Test settings’ and ‘Equivalent settings’ so that it’s possible to take a very short ‘throwaway’ exposure using a very high ISO. Once you’re happy with how the foreground looks — save for the high ISO noise — PhotoPills can then calculate the equivalent shutter speed for a much lower ISO (resulting in a very long exposure). It’s also sensible here to move to a higher aperture figure to increase sharpness, which the calculator can also account for.

Other features specifically for astrophotographers include sections for meteor showers (a list of the peak dates of the most active ones together with moon illumination and rise/set times for the sun and moon), Star Trails (which gives a graphical representation of how long your trails will be for any given time period, as well as a simple timer to alert you when your trail is finished) and Spot Stars (which gives you the maximum exposure times for your equipment before stars begin to trail). It’s the latter feature in particular that is the most useful if you’re taking wide-field images of the night sky using a tripod and no star tracker.

Although these tools are easy to use and incredibly useful, perhaps the most impressive part of PhotoPills for astrophotographers is the tailored, up-to-date advice available on the PhotoPills website and the PhotoPills YouTube channel. Amid guides like Solar Eclipses 2023: The Definitive Photography Guide, How To Plan A Total Lunar Eclipse and Total Solar Eclipse April 8, 2024, it’s possible to carry out detailed preparations well in advance for some of the biggest sky events of the decade.

Should I buy the PhotoPills app?

If you’ve always wanted to capture a full moon rising behind a landmark, then the user-friendly PhotoPills is for you but there’s much more to it than that. Even if all you want to do is take a night-sky shot including a foreground, then PhotoPills will tell you exactly how long you need to expose for. 

From moonrises and sunsets to eclipses and finding the bright core of the Milky Way, PhotoPills is ideal for anyone who wants to plan their astrophotography in advance — and that’s all astrophotographers. Add a useful Academy section packed with inspiration, tutorials and ‘how to’ articles and we think this feature-rich app is a must-have for all astrophotographers. 

If PhotoPills app isn’t for you

There are some alternatives to consider. Perhaps the main rival is The Photographer’s Ephemeris, which also gives astrophotographers rise and set times for the sun, moon and the galactic center, and also deals in meteor showers and eclipses. It’s not as slick as PhotoPills, but landscape photographers will love how it shows a landscape’s changing light and shadow around sunrise or sunset. It’s only available for iOS devices and is similarly priced to PhotoPills at $11.99 (£9.99). However, it does have a useful, free desktop version called Photo Ephemeris Web. 

PhotoPills is a map, a calculator and a celestial almanac rolled into one and much more besides. Photos of the moon setting behind the Statue of Liberty, the Milky Way arching across the night sky between two rock formations and a composite showing the stages of a solar eclipse; all of these photos of alignments have something in common — they were likely planned using PhotoPills. Designed to solve specific problems (hence the name ‘pills’) for photographers of all kinds, PhotoPills is particularly useful for astrophotographers and night photographers.

Although astrophotographers largely use it to find the right shooting spot on the correct date and at the right time to capture a specific event, PhotoPills is also helpful for finding the settings to take the shot, such as deciding which lens to use and calculating the exposure settings. It’s also a place to learn new techniques and to share images with a community of other users.

Jun. 13—SUMMIT — Space fans of all ages received a lesson in Astronomy and Astrophotography Tuesday afternoon at the Boyd County Midland Branch Public Library.

The lesson, headed by Ashland city commissioner Josh Blanton, included an interactive talk about galaxies, black holes, planetary orbits, telescopes and how to photograph sky and space phenomenon.

The visit was part of a wide variety of summer programs offered for teens and “tweens” sponsored by the library.

During the exhibit, titled “Explore the Universe with Josh,” Blanton said in the midst of the pandemic, he had the extra time to nurture his childhood infatuation with telescopes — leading to his new hobby of astrophotography.

Blanton said recent technology developments is revolutionizing astronomy, making far away things clearer and easier to observe for the average person with just their cell phones.

With the use of apps, one can map the sky above them to notify which planets are in transit and viewable sometimes with the naked eye.

Discussing light movement, gravitational pull and planetary tilts and rotations, Blanton displayed a variety of self-shot photos — or data —that depicted comets, the Andromeda Galaxy and Aurora borealis (northern lights).

Blanton said the Andromeda Galaxy is our solar system’s neighbor, set to eventually merge with the Milky Way Galaxy in about 4.5 million years.

Taking advantage of the darkest areas in the region, Blanton is able to utilize his camera’s long exposure to pull in as much light as possible in order to gain clear data of each phenomena — including a close-up shot of the Andromeda Galaxy from over 2.5 million lightyears away.

Blanton told the group telescopes behave as a time machine, as it takes so long for light to travel the insane distances to reach what the camera lens can pick up.

For those in the crowd eager for a career in space, Blanton mentioned a couple notables that got their start in Ashland.

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Susie Martinez, now an engineer for Blue Origin, started her educational journey at Ashland Community and Technical College before going on to further her education, eventually earning an internship with NASA.

Les Johnson, also a native of Ashland, is a physicist for NASA’s space propulsion program, dedicating his time and career to developing a way for humans to travel lightyears away.

Johnson is also a notable sci-fi author, recently vising Ashland for a talk at Highlands Museum and Discovery Center and book signings downtown.

At the end of the discussion, Blanton guided both children and adults outside in an attempt to view the moon with the instruction to check out the Ashland Area Astronomy and Astrophotography Facebook page.

For a full calendar of happenings at the Boyd County Public Library this month, visit www.thebookplace.org.

A Derry photographer is in the running for three prestigious awards for his space pictures.

Patryk Sadowski, from Derry city, has been shortlisted for awards in three categories of the ‘Reach for the Stars’ astrophotography competition run by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.

Mr Sadowski has three photographs in the competition.

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His image ‘Crescent Moon Over Donegal’ has been shortlisted in the ‘Out of this World’ category while two of his images, ‘Poisoned Glen Bridge & Milky Way’ and ‘Manannán mac Lir & Aurora’, have been shortlisted in the competition’s ‘Back on Earth’ category.

While a high-profile judging panel will select the overall winning entries in the coming weeks, an online vote was launched on Monday, so members of the public can also have their say.

Dr. Eucharia Meehan, CEO and Registrar of DIAS, said: “The online public vote to select the winner of the Public Choice Award brings Irish astrophotography to a much wider audience.

“Every year we see a large amount of the public engaging with it and voting for their favourite image. It will be a difficult task for people to choose a favourite from the shortlisted entries – and for the judging panel to select an overall winner.”

Dr Meehan added: “I’m looking forward to seeing the online gallery and what this year’s photographers have captured in our night sky. I’m so impressed by the level of creativity and skill we have amongst photographers in Derry and right across the country.”

Professor Peter Gallagher, also of DIAS, said: “I’m delighted to return for a third year of judging for the ‘Reach for the Stars’ competition. Each year we have seen exceptional standards from Irish astro-photographers. Photographers have shown great creativity and technical skill capturing everything, from stars and galaxies that are millions of light years away to stunning scenery back on earth.”

He added: “We hope the people of Derry will get involved again this year and cast their vote for their favourite image.”

Further information, including the online gallery and background information on the competition, is available here.

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