Lodestar Tours
Don’t put your camera away when the sun sets! Learn how to shoot night sky landscapes in our guided tours.
Learn more about our astronomy-themed photography tours, including itineraries, highlights, and pricing.
Equipment requirements:
Make sure you bring essential photography equipment, including a camera, accessories, and a laptop with editing software, to fully participate in our workshops.
- DSLR or Mirrorless Camera:
Full-frame cameras utilize wide-angle lenses best but an APS-C or crop sensor camera is fine. Must have interchangeable lenses, cameras with fixed lenses or point-and-shoot cameras don’t work well for night photos. - Lenses:
The kit lens, or a wide angle zoom and moderate telephoto zoom are sufficient. Wider angle prime (single focal length) lenses are helpful, in the 20mm to 14mm focal lengths. Lenses with apertures of f2.8 or wider are recommended. You won’t need super long telephoto lenses. We can suggest rental outlets if you need one. - Sturdy tripod with ball head or 3-way pan head
- Accessories:
Red flashlight or headlamp with red light
Remote release trigger with intervalometer
Extra camera batteries (at least 2 per camera) and charger
Extra memory cards (at least 2 per camera)
Extra batteries for remote and headlamp/flashlight - Laptop Computer:
Image browsing and processing programs
Memory card reader
Mouse (optional)
Portable external hard drive for backup - Software:
The Adobe CC photo package has all this: Photoshop, Camera RAW, Bridge and Lightroom. Bridge can be used for editing (browsing). A very good separate editing program is Photo Mechanic 5. This will download files from your card and connect seamlessly with Photoshop or Lightroom after you select your image.
Adobe Photoshop Elements is a good, inexpensive alternative to Photoshop. It has the basics, but won’t have some features that are helpful.
The computer should have enough hard drive memory to download your files as you shoot during the week. A portable hard drive or small solid-state drive is recommended as a backup.
