This is my favorite tip for star photography, both wide angle (with a foreground) and for deep-sky astrophotography! It's called image stacking. There's no better way to stretch the limits of what your camera can do. Even if you have basic entry-level equipment. Here are my software recommendations. I'm not getting any commissions on these (heck 3 of the 4 are free), they're just what I recommend.
When you have no foreground:
- Lynkeos (Mac). It's free, works great. The only issue is that you may need to align the photos yourself (only roughly) before loading them into the software, by batch cropping them in Lightroom or Photoshop.
- DeepSkyStacker (Windows). Freeware, and amazing at what it does. Highly recommended.
When you have foreground elements:
- Starry Landscape Stacker (Mac). It's not free (costs $40) but it works well, and there is no free alternative at the moment for Mac users that I've been able to find. It's what I used for the wide angle Milky Way photo in this tutorial.
- Sequator (Windows). Free, gets excellent reviews.
If you have any questions about star photography, let me know below and I'll do what I can to answer! You can read more about star stacking in the article I wrote earlier:
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