Using light-pollution maps for planning night shoots

- With their extreme sensitivity to light, digital cameras are ideal tools for taking pictures of the night sky. I don't mean just going out and shooting pure astrophotography images, but shooting landscapes with skies in the background. Whether you're going out for purely astrophoto reasons, or landscape shooting at night, there are some things that can get in your way no matter how good your sensor is in low light. Fortunately with the World Wide Web, you don't have to wonder about a lot of things that astrophotographers used to have to worry about. With a little bit of research before you go, you can really improve your chances of getting a sky that's going to serve you well.

I've got three websites I want to show you here. First thing is simply the weather. I'm looking at ClearDarkSky.com, an amazing site that allows you to tell it where you're at, and it's going to give you many days worth of information on how clear you can expect the sky to be. And you can see here I've got cloud cover, transparency, and we can see how dark, wind, humidity, temperature. This gives you more than just information on how clear the sky's gonna be, more humidity is going to mean more shimmer in the sky. So, this is a really great resource for figuring out if you've picked the right day to be out in a particular area.

So, the weather's clear, that's great. Depending on what you may want to shoot though, you may have some concerns about the moon. So over here at MoonConnection.com, and there are a lot of sites that'll do this, you can see a really nice lunar calendar. So if you're going out with the idea of shooting the moon, obviously you want the moon in a particular state, maybe you want it full, maybe you don't. If you're going out to shoot the Milky Way, or very faint phenomenon, you really want to be sure that there's no moon it all. Something that I use this for is going out, not with the idea of shooting the sky, but going out with the idea of using the moon as a light source.

So there are locations, I still haven't shot them all, that I would like to shoot by moonlight, because the light of a full moon is very, very bright. And so there are some locations that look really cool at night, doing low-light photography by moonlight. So, a moon phase calendar is a really handy tool for low-light shooting. In addition to these websites, there lots of phone apps that will tell you all this stuff also. Finally, and this one's a little bit sad, we all have to worry about light pollution. Too much light on the horizon, too much light in your area will wash out the sky and make good sky shooting impossible.

This is a wonderful map that lets you see exactly how much light pollution there will be in your area. We're here at Lynda HQ in Carpinteria, and we can see here, there's a key over here. Don't worry about the scale, you can just know for yourself that out here it's gonna be dark, and it's gonna get increasingly lighter heading into the coast. So I can see that we gotta go quite a ways before we can get out to complete darkness. As you work with this map a little bit more, you're beginning to understand how the colors on the map correspond to real-world lighting situations, and you'll be able to decide for yourself what you want.

If you're feeling frustrated because the place you want to go is not dark, or you can't get to somewhere dark on the night you want to shoot, then go the other direction. Shooting light pollution can be pretty also in the sky. It can create interesting glows, it's great for shooting silhouettes on the horizon, all sorts of things. So this is not just a map for finding dark, sometimes you're gonna want to know where it's light at night. Little bit of planning's gonna save you a lot of frustration, and these three sites and many more like them make this kind of planning very easy.