Josh Sweet: How to Shoot an Awesome Milky Way Panorama

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josh sweet astro panorama

In this interview, New Zealand’s Josh Sweet takes us through how he took this amazing Milky Way panorama (above).


How Did You Plan the Shot?

This shot wasn’t really planned. I knew I wanted to try and do a panorama but I didn’t know where to go or what to put in the foreground.

One night I went outside and checked the sky to see if it would be worth going out for photos, I saw the clearest Milky Way I have ever seen.

I knew I had to at least try to shoot so I went up the road a few kilometers until I could see all of the Milky Way arch.

I used the website In-The-Sky.org to see what direction the core would be in. The photos were taken at about 10:30 pm.

josh sweet widefield
Credit: Josh Sweet

What Equipment Did You Use?

This image was shot on the Sony A7 II camera with the Sony 28mm f/2 lens.

I used a wireless remote shutter.

I also love to use the Rokinon 14mm f/2.8 and the Sony Zeiss 55mm f/1.8 lenses.

How Did You Compose the Shot?

This is a stacked panorama of 99 different exposures, each exposure being 5 seconds long at f/2 and ISO 6400.

I used a higher ISO because I was stacking to remove noise and it allowed me to use a shorter shutter speed and let me get out of the cold quicker.

josh sweet milky way.jpg
Credit: Josh Sweet

What Post-Processing Did You Do?

I used Lightroom to do lens corrections and a slight white balance adjustment before I stacked them.

Stacking was done in Sequator to reduce noise with 5 images per stack.

I then imported them all to an application called Hugin which takes all of your images and stitches them together to create a panorama.

After the panorama was created I imported it into Lightroom where I made basic adjustments; white balance, tone curve, hue/saturation, etc. Then I went into Photoshop to fix some small errors from the stitching.

All of the post-processing took 7-8 hours. Most of my post I learned myself just messing around in Lightroom and some Youtube tutorials.

Sequator
Sequator

Can You Recommend Any Learning Resources For Other Astrophotographers?

I can highly recommend the website Lonely Speck, especially their tutorial on stacked astro panoramas, which is actually where I got the idea for this photo from:

Josh Sweet

About You – Josh Sweet

I live in New Zealand and am just a hobbyist right now but I would love to make photography my job!

My favorite types of photography have to be astrophotography and car/motorsport photography.

You can find me on Instagram @joshsweet24 if you want to see more of my work.

(This interview was first published on July 28, 2018)


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About the Author

Anthony Robinson is the founder and owner of Skies & Scopes, a publication and community focused on amateur astronomy and astrophotography. His work has been featured in publications such as Amateur Astrophotography, Forbes, the Guardian, DIY Photography, PetaPixel, and Digital Camera World - read more.

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