Astrophotography is one of my favorite types of photography, put simply capturing the night sky. Whilst there are different types of this photography (e.g. deep field / planetary) in my case I focus more on the wide field which incorporates landscape elements in addition to the night sky.

One of the challenges with wide field night photography is avoiding star trails, you can use a star tracker to counter the rotation of the earth (and keep sharp stars), or in my case you can adapt your shutter speed to prevent trailing.

If you want to adapt your shutter speed, you can apply the 1/600 rule, this means that you divide 600 by the focal length of the lens and ensure that the shutter speed is not greater than this value. Using my 15mm focal length as an example the result is 40 which means I cant have my shutter speed any greater than 40 seconds otherwise trails will occur (the longer the focal length the shorter the duration).

Because of the limitation around shutter speeds, I set my aperture as low as possible (f/2.8) but since the aim is to get as much light as possible into the camera I need to increase my ISO (to 6400 or sometimes higher) which leads to a significant amount of noise.

I wanted to show a picture of this noise and an example of one of the tools I use to address it. I specifically use Topaz Photo AI (DeNoise) but also Topaz DeNoise AI, in this image the left hand side is the image which was passed through Topaz Photo AI (DeNoise) whilst the right hand side is the unedited side.

You can very clearly see that Topaz Photo AI removed a significant part of the noise without significantly affecting the image, whilst many would say reduce ISO in many cases that is not possible, in which case a tool like Topaz Photo AI can be super useful. If you want to find out more about Topaz Photo AI you can do so at the link: https://trav.to/PhotoAI #Ad