my astrophotography journey.
1.0 2017
2.0 2018 - 2021
3.0 2022
4.0 2023
​5.0 2024
1.0 2017
This was the first year i decided to pick up a camera and point it at the night sky. I had no idea at all what i was doing, and many of my images that i took that year were out of focus/underexposed/just generally pretty bad. That being said, they're also very nostalgic (and ignoring the poor image quality), some of my favorite images i've ever taken.
From the first time i clicked the camera shutter and saw stars appear on the back of the camera display, i was hooked.
image 1: my first ever astro image taken May 17 2017
My first image was nothing special. I simply pointed the camera at the sky, tried to focus on the stars, and took a 25 second long photo (in jpeg format, i didn't even know what a raw file was at the time). But, you can see stars!
After verifying that i could in fact get a photo of the stars, a couple of friends and i tried to set up a nice composition.
image 2: taken May 2017
We huddled behind the camera trying to figure out the best camera setting, and how much sky should be in the photo etc. before eventually settling on the photo above. Although i wouldn't really call this my photo (i'm the one on the left while my friend clicked the shutter), it's still one of my favorite photos to date.
It's objectively a bad photo as it's out of focus and underexposed, but theres just something about it that i've never been able to replicate since. A night spent with friends under the night sky, trying out this new astrophotography thing for the first time. A very nostalgic image that i think will always be a favorite of mine.
image 3: taken May 2017
Over the next few weeks to months, i took many more images of the night sky. I wouldn't say i improved much, but i experimented with different settings and compositions. The image above was taken in my backyard, looking towards the bright star Sirius. Another of my favorites from this era despite the technical flaws. Something about the out of focus stars, the light pollution from Auckland reflecting off the clouds, and the native new zealand forest as a foreground just work well together.
image 4: taken June 2017
This is the last image from 2017 that i'll put on here. Another shot from near my home, under some faint moonlight (and light pollution). This is yet another image that is technically poor, shot in jpeg format, trailing stars etc. but it's another of my favorites and very nostalgic to me.
Although i still enjoy shooting images of the night sky today, there was something unique about this point in time. It was when i still had no idea what i was doing, so every new technique or new part of the sky was exciting to discover. For example in the photo above, i didn't know how cool a long exposure of my neighborhood through the trees would look so there was an element of surprise on the back of the camera display. These days i know exactly what to expect from my exposures, as it's now much more calculated than experimental, and i guess i do miss that aspect of it.
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All of these images were taken on my parents camera, a Canon 750D (aka Canon rebel T6i).
2.0 2018-2021
At the start of 2018 i decided to do a four year engineering degree, and that pretty much put my astrophotography on pause. While i did get out under the stars maybe a couple of times per year, my photos didn't really improve much during this period. However, i did get a Canon 800D at the beginning of 2018 along with a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens. I did also have access to some very dark skies in 2018, so the milky way is much more visible in my images than under the light polluted sky of Auckland.
Another issue that i've realized in hindsight is that i was terrible at processing my images, they were too blue and overly contrasted, a look that amateur astrophotographers often edit into their photos (and unfortunately i was no exception). Some of these photos were so bad that i've gone back and reprocessed them, to give a more natural white balance.
image 5: taken May 2018
This image was taken with a couple of friends while studying down in the south island. There were some awesome rock formations with bortle 1-2 skies above, so the milky way was very easy to capture.
image 6: taken July 2018
Also in 2018, i went on a road trip down to Tongariro National Park. The night sky down here is (in my opinion) one of the best in the country, with incredible volcanic landscapes as a foreground. This is where i took my first good 50mm image of the milky way core (good for the gear i had at least), as seen above. Despite these images being (once again) underexposed and not particularly sharp, i still remember being very excited at the result on the back of my camera screen as i shot them.
image 7: taken January 2019
My first image in 2019 was taken shortly after new years, although it would be one of only a few times i shot the night sky that year. Unfortunately i also took these pictures in jpeg format so there isn't much detail/color i can bring out. This edit, seen above, was the original edit i did after taking this photo. At the time i thought it looked pretty cool.
image 8: taken April 2019
A few months after that, i took my first milky way panorama. Specifically at 50mm. At the time i remember thinking this image was awesome, with details i'd never seen before in the dust of the milky way. I also remember thinking the group of five stars to the left of the milky way looked quite cool too, which years later i would discover was rho ophiuchi. Despite that, i had no idea how to edit this photo at the time so i just added the usual dehaze etc. in lightroom, giving a rather unnatural look. The version above was a re edit i did a year or two later, i don't particulary like this edit either but at least the white balance is quite natural looking.
I did take a couple of images while in australia that year too, but given it was with the same equipment and still in the southern hemisphere, the photos looked basically the same as the ones above.
image 9: taken November 2020
To the surprise of probably no one, i didn't get out to take many photos in 2020. Although i did go for an end of year road trip around the south island as things opened up again. The image above was taken at Mount Cook, a place that years later would become my backyard. At the time i didn't really bother taking many night photos as there was too much moonlight to capture the milky way, but looking back on these images i think the moonlight adds something, especually reflecting off the glaciers on Mount Sefton (left) and Mount Cook (right).
image 10: taken May 2021
This was basically the only image i took in 2021, and at first i wasn't even going to include it because, well, look at it. But i decided to keep at least one photo per year so here it is.
This whole night was a disaster. A couple of friends and i set out on a clear moonless night to somewhere very remote (in the hope of very dark skies). After driving for almost two hours, and right before we arrived, we crashed the car. Nothing major, but enough that we were stranded and without cell service. Thankfully there was a wedding reception happening somewhere up the road in the mountains, so we managed to catch a ride to the nearest house and call for someone to pick us up.
In the time that we were stranded on the side of the road, i set my camera up on the top of the car and took the photo seen above. You can actually see the lagoon nebula rising above the mountains, with the milky way core above it which i think is cool.
3.0 2022
I finally finished studying in 2021, and graduated a few months later with my engineering degree, so i actually had some free time again in 2022. This is also when i started using a star tracker for the first time, a small device that rotates your camera with the movement of the sky (technically the earth), allowing you to capture sharp images with even several minutes of exposure time. As soon as i saw my first tracked image of the milky way on the back of the camera, i was hooked again.
image 11: taken May 2022
I was out taking photos almost every clear night after figuring out how to use my tracker. And a few months after that, i took on a new job and moved back down to the south island (where i currently am as i type this). This gave me access to some of the best night skies in the world, right in my literal backyard.
image 12: taken September 2022
4.0 2023
In 2023, i decided to finally start buying some good lenses, as well as an astro modified camera (where a filter is removed from the sensor allowing more red light into the camera). I also started making high detail panoramas, often consisting of 20+ individual photos.
image 13: taken August 2023
The image above was my first full sky panorama at 28mm, giving more detail in the sky than i'd ever achieved before. The combination of detail in the milky way, and strong bands of airglow surrounding the sky, make this one of my favorite images i've taken.
image 14: taken December 2023
I also put a lot of energy into improving my processing skills in 2023, allowing me to reveal much fainter details and colors in the night sky.
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And this takes me to now at the time of writing. I'm not sure where i'll be shooting from in the future or where this hobby might take me, but as light pollution continues to eat away at our night sky, i'm enjoying capturing the universe above our heads while it's still there.
5.0 2024 (Update - April 2025)
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Well, a year in Mount Cook National Park quickly turned into more than two. I'm writing this in my final few weeks here before i head home for a month and then depart for the US once again, hoping to catch the dark skies of the American south-west.
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2024 ended up being my favorite year of photography so far. I knocked off several bucketlist images, travelled to the Australian outback, and even had an image featured in NASA's APOD (astronomy picture of the day).
image 15: taken July 2024
I've also come to appreciate a more subtle approach to astrophotography in 2024. While tracked panoramas will probably always be my bread and butter, it's nice to catch single exposures from time to time - showing more of what a starry night looks like to a human, rather than a camera. I made a collection for this style of images (with a few extra things thrown in) here.
image 16: taken December 2024