Nightscaper 2024

Cody York, Dreamland Safari Tours Milky Way instructor shares some of his favorite night sky locations in Northern Arizona, including the best times to visit, what it takes to get there and how to set yourself up for success. 

By now, you’ve undoubtedly seen epic deepscape images appear across the various Nightscaper communities and the rest of photo-sharing world. Deepscapes combine a compelling deep-sky object (the “deep” in deepscape)—such as a nebula, star cluster, distant galaxy or even a constellation—along with a foreground landscape (the “scape” in deepscape)—such as a mountain, building or other Earth-based feature of interest. In this first presentation of a two-part series, Mike will discuss how to design your deepscape image using various planning tools, including a planisphere, Stellarium, Planit Pro and PhotoPills. Part of this will describe the top deep-sky objects and when/where/how to find them. Next, you will learn the technical steps needed to capture the deep-sky and foreground images necessary for blending into a deepscape, including when and how to use a star tracker as a critical part of the process along with suggested camera settings.

Join Rafael (the bard of PhotoPills) and learn how to use PhotoPills to plan your photos involving the sun, natural light, the moon and the Milky Way.

Royce has always been a “Milky Way Nightscape” photographer. In fact, he wrote the book on photographing starry night skies as points of light. So why is he giving a presentation on star trails?
1. Because at least one-quarter of the year doesn’t have a Milky Way core to photography.
2. Because many of our best foreground subjects face north, or northwest and northeast.
3. Because star trails are uniquely different and interesting.
This presentation will show four different ways to make star trails: two are super easy, and two are a little more complicated. One technique may give you results beyond your wildest dreams!

TK

So … you are in Utah. The moon is new. The sky is clear. It is the middle of the night. You are actually awake and on location. Now is not the time to worry about your camera settings. Join Nikon’s Paul Van Allen before you head out, for an in-depth look at some of the tech buried in your camera that is made just for night sky imaging.