So this was a very fun and interesting experiment, with some surprising results. I've previously read enough about astro photography, to understand a few things. First, I need to be in a dark area with no light pollution. Secondly, my little wind up electric car doesn't have enough range to get me to one of these areas. At least not if I want a return trip home that evening. So last night, I got an itch and wanted to see just what could be done where I live. So after work, I got on YouTube and refreshed my memory by watching “How to photoraph the Milky Way in <5 minutes”. My goal was not to make an amazing photo, but rather to see what could be done from my backyard in Antioch, TN, 10 minutes from downtown Nashville.

All the conditions were wrong. The moon was out, literally full, and bright. I was also pointing my camera towards all the light pollution of Nashville. The video I watched brought me to an astro photoraphy calculator. After entering a few bits of info about my camera's capabilities, the lens I was using, etc., I was instructed to use a shutter speed of about 30”. This didn't make much sense to me, because I was always told that anything over 15” would start to give you star trails, due to the rotation of the Earth. Nevertheless, I followed the instructions. I took a few photos and uploaded them into Lightroom.

First astro photo ever. Taken at 11:47pm.

There were two moments during this experiment, which made my mouth drop. This was the first one. The photos were so overexposed, I thought they were completely useless. Shooting with a mirrorless camera, I don't yet understand why this didn't show up on the LCD screen of my camera. Normally, what I see is what I get and I know immediately if I'm overexposing something. In this case, it was like shooting with a DSLR. I wouldn't know it was overexposed, because I didn't bother reviewing the images until I took a few and imported them into Lightroom. At this point, it was just a learning experience, but now that I was behind the computer with my photos, I decided to play around and see if I could actually get any detail out of them.

This was the second time my mouth dropped. I couldn't believe the level of detail I could bring back from these images. The white light at the bottom of the image is from the lights of Nashville, so that can't be salvaged, but I was very impressed with the rest of it. These are not photos I would share with anyone, other than for this example as a teaching tool of sorts. As in “don't do what I did, but look what you can still do with the image”. I've now learned a lot more about this genre. I've looked at light pollution maps before, but until today, I had no idea what a Bortle scale was. This may sound pretty amateur to anyone reading this, and that's because it is. I'm learning more about photography every day. I certainly know more as I type this, than I did last night, when I was taking super overexposed images. I thought it was pretty neat and this is definitely something I would like to do more of. Perhaps I'll get the opportunity on my trip to Colorado in a few weeks.

A few things I've learned:

I live in a Bortle class 6.
The Milky Way is very weak or invisible near the horizon and looks rather washed out overhead in a Bortle class 5.
I can easily get to a Bortle class 5 in about 20 minutes.
With my particular vehicle I can get to a Bortle class 4 with some prior planning, and a charge to and from, in about 30 miles.
In my opinion, the best photos I'm going to get of the Milky Way (with the least amount of driving) are going to be from the north side of McEwen, TN, looking northwest into a Bortle class 3. So if anyone would like to take a trip and offer their vehicle, so I don't have to rent one, I'm down for the road trip and will pay you for gas! McEwin is about a 1hr 20min drive.