DIY Photography

Your one stop shop for everything photo-video

  • News
  • Inspiration
  • Reviews
  • Tutorials
  • DIY
  • Gear
Search

Submit A Story

How to shoot and stitch panorama when photographing the Milky Way

Jun 10, 2019 by Dunja Djudjic 1 Comment

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

The Milky Way looks impressive in photos, and it’s a favorite subject of many astrophotographers. You can give it a new dimension in your images by capturing it in a panorama. In this video, photographer Mike Smith shares a step-by-step guide for creating a Milky Way panorama, from setting up your camera to stitching the images together.

Before the shoot

The Milky Way has a season, so keep in mind that you should determine where it’s gonna be in the sky at your location. You can use PhotoPills to determine it, and Mike suggests that the period between March and July is the best for capturing the photos of our galaxy.

To create a panorama, you’ll need to take multiple photos and stitch them together in Photoshop, Lightroom or another program. You should have lots of overlap, so the computer doesn’t have the problem to stitch the photos together. For this purpose, you can get a panoramic tripod head to make sure that you don’t turn the camera too much. Mike uses this one by Fotga.

Mike uses a 25mm lens and suggests that you start with the 24mm or 25mm lens. From there on, you can try and capture the photos for your panorama with a wider or a longer lens. You can even use a kit lens. Wider lenses (under 20mm) can produce a lot of distortion, especially cheaper ones. It can make it a bit trickier for the computer to stitch the panorama, but you can fix the distortion in Lightroom.

Shooting

When you get to the location, set up the camera: make sure that the tripod is level and that the camera is turned vertically.

Also, use manual settings so they don’t change for each photo. This includes manual focusing, so the focus will stay consistent throughout the shoot.

If you have the panoramic tripod head, Mike advises to set it to 15 degrees between each shot. With the 25mm lens, you should have plenty of overlap. But even if you don’t have the way to measure the angle of turn, you can solve this in a different way. Use live view or bright monitoring and use the stars you can see in your frame as a reference. Make sure that they appear in at least two frames, so you have enough overlap for the panorama.

Another thing to pay attention to is having enough space above the top of the Milky Way. This way it won’t get cropped when you stitch the photos together into a panorama. If the Milky Way is too low in the sky, you won’t get much of an arc in the shot. If it’s too high, you’ll start to lose the top of it in the middle of the panorama, so think about your composition.

Stitching

Finally, when you’re done shooting, it’s time to get home, edit your photos and create the panorama. You can do it in Photoshop or Lightroom, but sometimes they have trouble stitching photos. If this happens, Mike suggests using PTGui, which is a dedicated panorama program.

In the video, Mike uses Lightroom to create his final image. Start by bringing your photos into Lightroom. Select all the images you want to turn into a panorama Apply lens correction to remove the distortion and do the basic editing. Then synchronize the images so that the changes are applied to all of them.

To create the panorama, select all images, right-click, select Photo Merge > Panorama. Set the parameters and click “Merge” to create your final image. Mike suggests that you do the remaining editing job when the panorama is already merged. If you fully edit all the photos before merging, the transitions between them could become visible in the final product.

If you’d like to learn more about shooting the Milky Way, here you can read a comprehensive guide, and here you can get a few more quick tips. And if you want to turn your shots into a stellar panorama, check out Mike’s video above.

[Astrophotography Panoramas with the Milkyway How To | Mike Smith]

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Related posts:

How to shoot and stitch a Milky Way panorama in Lightroom A 46 Gigapixel Milky Way ‘panorama’ you can interact with Default ThumbnailHow The Panorama Of Arching Milky Way over the Bungle Bungles Was Taken Photographing the Milky Way with a Smartphone and the Future of Photography

Filed Under: Tutorials Tagged With: astrophotographer, Astrophotography, Mike Smith, Milky Way, Milky Way Photography, panorama

Dunja Djudjic: from diyphotography.net

About Dunja Djudjic

Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.

« Fujifilm performs a 180 and is actually reintroducing Acros film
How to create stunning light painting portraits and nail focus every time »

Submit A Story

Get our FREE Lighting Book

DIYP lighting book cover

* download requires newsletter signup
DIYPhotography

Recent Comments

Free Resources

Advanced lighting book

Recent Posts

  • Here’s a bullet time video booth you can build yourself
  • Ricoh has discontinued the HD PENTAX-DA 21mm F3.2AL Limited silver lens
  • This “stellar flower” unravels the twilight’s evolution in 360 degrees
  • Strobes vs Continuous LEDs – Which is right for you?
  • Wave goodbye to Apple’s My Photo Stream next month

Udi Tirosh: from diyphotography.netUdi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.

Alex Baker: from diyphotography.netAlex Baker is a portrait and lifestyle driven photographer based in Valencia, Spain. She works on a range of projects from commercial to fine art and has had work featured in publications such as The Daily Mail, Conde Nast Traveller and El Mundo, and has exhibited work across Europe

David Williams: from diyphotography.netDave Williams is an accomplished travel photographer, writer, and best-selling author from the UK. He is also a photography educator and published Aurora expert. Dave has traveled extensively in recent years, capturing stunning images from around the world in a modified van. His work has been featured in various publications and he has worked with notable brands such as Skoda, EE, Boeing, Huawei, Microsoft, BMW, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Discovery, BBC, The Guardian, ESPN, NBC, and many others.

John Aldred: from diyphotography.netJohn Aldred is a photographer with over 20 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter - and occasional beta tester - of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.

Dunja Djudjic: from diyphotography.netDunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.

Copyright © DIYPhotography 2006 - 2023 | About | Contact | Advertise | Write for DIYP | Full Disclosure | Privacy Policy