A chance encounter with the starry sky at Tekapo

To

be honest, seeing the milky way with my own eye is astonishing while also euphoric for me, a young man from an industrialized city with scarce and dim stars shimmering in the sky. It was a spontaneous decision to capture the star lights in Tekapo as I never planned that in my trip. It was almost at midnight, and I was in my bed. Suddenly, in a glimpse of the sight outside of the window, I saw the milky way, glamorous, shiny, mysterious and profound.

“I should capture that!”—“but I have no experience in that”, “It is intricate”—“but I can learn it now”. I pack up in 5 minutes and get under the gallery of star.

I decided to take pict

ures of both the star field and the star trail. Based on the equipment that I have—Nikon Z63 and Nikkor 24-200 f4 lens, I use:

24mm focal length (The widest I have)

f4 aperture (The largest I have)

20s exposure

6400 iso

3400K white balance

For star field, I use 5 pictures for staking to reduce noise and for star trail I use 60 pictures for staking to get a short length trail. The application that I use for staking is Sequator.

Till next morning, I finally knew that Lake Tekapo is one of the world’s premier stargazing destinations, located within the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve. It’s extremely low light pollution and high-altitude, dry climate create exceptionally clear night skies. It is one of the most popular places for astrophotography over the world.

It really needs both mettle and fortuitous to capture the stars.

For me, It takes 5 hours from half past 12am to half past 5am for me to capture 4 high quality(for me) pictures of the stars at night. In the abysmal condition of 1-5 degree Celsius and large wind, I need to select good angle and gingerly check my mode, equipment and finally take shots. While, the weather, light condition etc. are also significant for astrophotography, so it needs fortune.

I hope to take more photos like this.