Nightscaper 2024

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.