Durdle Door Milky Way Photography

Ah, spring… the time of year when the Milky Way is visible in the English skies again and photographers the land over rush to their favourite geographical feature to take pictures of the galactic core rising behind it. Including me.

How It Works

Milky Way photography is tricky at the best of times but there are added complications in England. Being so far north, you can only see it for half the year, from about March-September, after which the Earth tilts too much and the galactic core disappears from our skies again until the following year. Also, there is generally quite a lot of light pollution meaning you may have to travel quite far to find somewhere dark enough to make it worthwhile.

Then, of course, you’re limited to nights when the moon isn’t washing out the sky with its light, so the best times are a few days either side of the new moon.

And then, because the days get progressively longer as we approach June 21st, the window of opportunity during the night when the sky is completely dark is literally only a couple of hours. Called astronomical twilight, this is the darkest part of the night and is so short because, with the northern hemisphere of the Earth tilting more forwards during summer, our sun still lights up the sky for a long time after setting and before rising.

In June, the nights are so short there is no proper period of astronomical twilight so the best months for Milky Way photography in the UK are April and August.

In short, there’s a limited number of hours during a limited number of nights on a limited number of months when it’s possible to photograph the Milky Way properly. Then you also need clear skies!

When all these conditions are met, you’re good to go.

I completely forgot about the new moon in April until about 5 days later and it was a gorgeous clear day when I checked the PhotoPills app at around 5pm (by far the best app for checking night skies) which showed a narrow window from midnight to around 1.40am when the conditions would be ideal. I quickly made my mind up, packed my things, and set off around 8.30pm.

My Latest Attempt

Now, this was during the Coronavirus lockdown but it was after the initial relaxing where you could then leave your house and travel an unlimited distance for exercise or work. I decided that carrying a load of camera equipment down the steep paths to Durdle Door and back up for my photography website ticked both boxes.

I arrived around 11.30, parked up and lugged everything down to get set up. I was using my mid-range and had also borrowed Kate’s 5d to get some full-frame action going on too. I didn’t notice at the time but the shots from the 5d have come out with bright white, red & blue marks on them as if some of the pixels are broken so not sure what that’s all about.

However, using the 5d did convince me I need (ok, want) a full-frame camera for astrophotography so I have my sights set firmly on a 6d Mk II.

Astrophotography Gear

There’s a pretty low barrier to entry for taking shots like these. Any half-decent DSLR or mirrorless camera will do, when coupled with a reasonably wide and fast lens and tripod.

That’s all you need. Of course, you can spend a lot of money on dedicated kit for these types of shots, but if you’re already into photography and want to have a go at capturing the night sky, it makes sense to try with what you already have and then upgrade if you get into it more and reach a point where your gear is limiting your results.

The lens I’m using is a Samyang 2.8 which, at 14mm, is very wide-angle and ideal for astrophotography. It’s much cheaper than the official Canon equivalents and offers great results, meaning it’s many astrophotographers’ go-to lens. Also, it’s available in various formats for mounting onto different camera bodies if you use Nikon or Sony.

There’s an affiliate link on the right to this lens on Amazon if you’re interested in purchasing one. An affiliate link means that, if you buy the product through the link on here, I’ll earn a small commission which helps with the costs of maintaining this site and doesn’t cost you any more.

Technique

This was my 3rd time taking shots of the Milky Way and I have a lot to learn, but I was still pretty happy with how these shots turned out. Compared to my last attempts (which were basically serendipitous accidents discovered while I was in Bolivia), these have come out with a lot more detail in the stars and far more interesting foreground, which is a direct result of better planning. How very unlike me!

They are all single images - I haven’t stacked them - and I wasn’t using a sky tracker so there is some noise, a bit of star blur, and they’re not as sharp as I’d like. I’m not very good at manually focusing to infinity in the dark but have been researching tips to improve on this for next time.

On the plus side, I captured loads of shooting stars!

I took photos from four different spots while there - two up on the cliff above Durdle Door, one looking across Man O’ War beach, and then down on the beach as the Milky Way rose to capture it behind the arch - spending about 40 mins in each spot. All in, I was taking photos from 11:45 to 3am, by which point I was taking progressively worse pictures as the sky lightened noticeably so I called it a night and packed up.

I did a bit of playing around with settings while there but most shots were between 20 and 45 seconds’ exposure, ISO 1600 - 6400 with an aperture of 2.8. at 14mm. As you can see from these two images (left and below), a lot of unusual colours came out - I haven’t over-saturated them in post-production at all, the camera sensors genuinely picked these up and they came out with a slight increase in contrast, lowering of highlights, and dehazing.

If anyone’s interested in more specific guidance on Milky Way photography, I’ll be happy to put one together for a future blog post (disclaimer: I’m not an expert in this area but have reasonable theoretical knowledge).

Although I was quite pleased with my resulting images, I am of course my own harshest critic and have come to realise that I need to create composite images to get the results I really want.

This is how the most amazing night sky photos are made - the foreground shots are usually taken separately (either earlier in the evening or just for far longer exposures of 4 minutes or more) and then a composite image is created using the perfectly exposed foreground with the perfectly exposed sky. Usually as well, the sky shots will be stacked (layered on top of each other) to reduce noise and improve the level of detail).

This is the technique I aim to try out next new moon! (I’m going to give it a go in June despite the lack of astronomical twilight as I could use the practice.)

So there you have it… feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments section below! If you’re an astrophotography ninja and have any tips for me, I’d love to hear them.

Til next time,

Marc x