Photographing the Heavens on a Budget

I recently gave a talk to Astro2, the Astronomy and Physics Society in NUI Maynooth. The talk focused on taking photos of the heavens without breaking the bank. If you set your expectations appropriately you can shoot the sky with literally any camera. You’ve not going turn your iPhone into the Hubble Space Telescope of course, but you can always get something nice, even if it’s “just” including the Moon and planets into your landscape shots.

The core idea is that you need to take as much control away from the camera’s computer as possible, so that you can push the device right up to it’s limits. To do that you need to understand how your camera works, so the talk starts with a primer on the theory of photography.

The talk is very heavily illustrated with example photos, and each example comes with a description of the settings used when shooting it.

I was asked in the talk to upload the slide deck, so I have (sorry it took so long).

Click to View Presentation