Planning tutorial: beginner's guide to planning your first milky way photograph shoot

Beginner's guide to taking and post editing milky way photographs 

This post is in two parts:

• PART A - a cheat sheet to help your decision making on the night or on a reccy  - see below

• PART B - sharing my post editing workflow for milky way images  - see next post here at https://undersouthwestskies.blogspot.com/2025/12/editing-tutorial-guide-to-how-i-post.html

Part A - a cheat sheet to help your decision making on the night or on a reccy

Below you will find three images which you can print screen and assemble onto an A4 sheet and then print off:

Copyright PlymouthAstroBoy

Based on own thinking and learning from two different 'free' on-line courses by 

Kristina Rose Photography and Dan Zafra Photography

The sheet is straight forward enough to use - it takes you through a series of questions/decisions. At the end you should have a clear picture of WHAT ytou want to achieve and HOW you are going to achieve it. 

Let me know if you find it useful and whether there are changes you would recommend - drop me a comment in the box at the end of the post. 

Whilst the sheet above is a good prompt on the night or during a reccy - there are other things to consider and I wrote a series of posts some time ago about other aspects:

• https://undersouthwestskies.blogspot.com/2025/02/beginners-guide-to-taking-your-first.html   EQUIPMENT 
• https://undersouthwestskies.blogspot.com/2025/02/beginners-guide-to-taking-your-first_19.html  PLANNING 
  
• https://undersouthwestskies.blogspot.com/2025/02/beginners-guide-to-taking-your-first_20.html  SETTINGS 
  
• https://undersouthwestskies.blogspot.com/2025/02/beginners-guide-to-taking-your-first_5.html  COMPOSITION 
  
• https://undersouthwestskies.blogspot.com/2025/02/beginners-guide-to-taking-your-first_21.html  STACKING and TRACKING
  
• https://undersouthwestskies.blogspot.com/2025/02/beginners-guide-to-taking-your-first_22.html  SELFIES 

A recent effort from along my milky way photography learning journey

Wembury Church South Devon 

Imaging session - First milky way images of 2025

 So, we took our motorhome 'Bryony' (it was going to be named 'Brian' after the snail in The Magic Roundabout. But, the motorhome didn't look a 'Brian' - more a 'Bryony! So there's the story. Our old caravan was 'Florence'; our car is 'Zebedee'. You can see a theme here! Sixties child! Sorry I digress!) down to Charmouth for a week. 

A combined trip - fossil hunting for the Boss and trying to catch the first rising of the galactic core in the Milky Way for me. 

Wow. There's some light pollution down at Portland and Weymouth! 

The two images below are the same data - 12 x 20" at ISO 1600 using Canon 800D (astro-modded) and Samyang 14 mm F/2.8 all stacked in Sequator and then processed in Affinity photo. The starless image was processed in SIRIL using Starnet++ but when I put the stars back in - it looked horrendous. No idea why, so I kept it starless which is a tad unrealistic isn't it. 

The bright light out to sea is, I think, the Portland lighthouse

The astro-modded camera certainly picks out the H-alpha

The starless image - broody and moody - I just cannot get SIRIL to reduce the number of stars.

You can see the image below when I did star recomposition. Infuriating and in reality, processing in affinity photo was much easier than in SIRIL and this was using the same image from Sequator! 

This post editing malarkey is hard work. Have I said that before? 😕 Sorry! 😂