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1: Beat the Blur
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Keep your gear stable to avoid camera shake and blur during exposures. On Earth, the 400mm f/2.8 weighs quite a few pounds and definitely requires a tripod. In weightlessness, it becomes a beautiful piece of equipment to use. And it’s heavy enough that small things like your heartbeat won’t make the lens jiggle.
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Photo Credit: NASA/Don Pettit
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2: Love What You See
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Photograph what captures your interest. There’s so much to photograph when looking up: stars, aurora, noctilucent clouds, and more. Focus on what you love as you might spot something wonderful the telescopes miss. Often times it takes a human being in the loop to take a picture of something that nobody thought would be worth taking a picture of.
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Photo Credit: NASA/Don Pettit
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3: Sometimes Perfect Doesn’t Exist
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The traits that make a good photograph in space still apply to taking a picture on Earth. Focus is really important. And exposure. Aurora is particularly tricky. The green part of the aurora is about two stops brighter than the red part. If you expose for the greens, you won’t see the reds. If you expose for the reds, the greens will be saturated. Even if you don’t get a technically perfect shot, what you capture can still be wonderful.
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Photo Credit: NASA/Don Pettit
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4: Try Fishing
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Don’t be afraid to go wide! If photographing within small spaces, wide-angle lenses are your friend. Like if you want to take pictures to show the dynamics of what’s going in the cupola itself, I would typically use a 16mm fisheye lens on a full 35mm format digital camera.
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Photo Credit: NASA/Don Pettit
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5: Cut the Glare
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Reflections can plague nighttime photography if you’re shooting through a window. Even if they have anti-reflection coatings, like in the cupola, you still get reflections, and they can spoil your imagery. You can make something we call a witch’s hat, where the peak of the witch’s hat fastens onto the camera lens and then flares out to cover the window, to kill reflections. Or a giant black ‘turtleneck’ also works.
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Photo Credit: NASA/Don Pettit
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6: Go Long
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To capture great star-trail images, put your camera on a tripod, point it some place up in the sky, and leave the shutter open for a long exposure. As Earth turns while the shutter’s open, the stars make trails. Coupled with fast f/1.4 or f/1.2 lenses and a low ISO, the images will come out sharp. I tried the same thing from station.
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Photo Credit: NASA/Don Pettit
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7: Bring in the Best of Both Worlds
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To balance star exposures with the foreground, try taking different exposures for each and combining them later. I did this for combining foregrounds and cities at night. In rapid succession you take an image that’s exposed properly for the stars and then you take an image that’s exposed properly for cities on Earth, and then maybe an image or two exposed properly for the green part of the aurora and then the red part of the aurora. Then the work comes later when you take five of these images and put them all together to make a single HDR composite.
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Photo Credit: NASA/Don Pettit
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8: Back It Up
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Keep your full-resolution RAWs, just in case! I remember when I used to reduce all my images to 1600×1200 because there wasn’t a way to display them with any higher resolution at the time. I’ve got all these archived images where I, for disk space’s sake, got rid of the RAW files and just kept the dumbed-down ones. And now I’m thinking how silly that was, because I can’t display them in a slideshow on our HD TV and have it fill the frame now.
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Shooting for the moon: Photo tips from a NASA astronaut
Photo Credit: NASA/Don Pettit
Many of us have dabbled in astrophotography, but it’s a fair bet that none of us have captured star trails quite like Don Pettit has. A NASA astronaut and photographer, part of his job aboard the International Space Station has included photographing Earth from space. The subject of a recent SmugMug profile, his photos go beyond pure documentation, capturing the spectacle of aurora, vast glowing cities and light trails created by the planet and the sky.
If you too want to shoot like a NASA astronaut, Pettit has provided us with eight tips for shooting in space. You can see more of his images at SmugMug.
1: Beat the Blur
Keep your gear stable to avoid camera shake and blur during exposures. On Earth, the 400mm f/2.8 weighs quite a few pounds and definitely requires a tripod. In weightlessness, it becomes a beautiful piece of equipment to use. And it’s heavy enough that small things like your heartbeat won’t make the lens jiggle.
Started out doing photography at the age of 6 using an uncle's old 1940 kodak brownie box camera. At 15 years of age, I decided to buy my very own 1975 Praktica SLR camera. I now shoot with a Nikon D850. I do unpaid TFP and commercial paid work. I also do Video Editing.
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