Astrophotography

Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered where the stars came from, or how they might interact across such vast distances? I have. That curiosity, along with a growing fascination for space exploration, led me to discover astrophotography, which is the astronomical equivalent of landscape photography.

Astrophotography completely changed how I view the sky.

The main difference is not the sky itself, but how much light is collected from it. Human vision (our eyes) gathers light in real time, over fractions of a second. A camera, on the other hand, can collect light continuously for minutes or even hours. When these long ‘exposures’ are combined, extremely faint details slowly build up. What begins as a nearly empty frame can transform into a detailed image of deep space that the eye could never perceive directly.

About Astrophotography

Although the final images appear highly detailed and layered, the process behind capturing these images is surprisingly simple.

Each target is tracked using an equatorial mount, which compensates for Earth’s rotation so that the camera remains fixed on the object. Multiple long exposures are taken, often under light-polluted skies where individual frames show very little structure. These frames are then aligned and stacked using software, which strengthens the signal from the object while reducing random noise from the atmosphere, camera sensor, and surrounding light pollution.

This process is similar to making a stock or broth. One ingredient on its own may taste weak or unclear, but by slowly combining many ingredients and simmering them together, the deeper flavours become richer and more distinct while unwanted impurities are filtered out.

Further processing adjusts contrast and reveals faint structures that are already present in the data but invisible in a single exposure. This stage is analogous to slowly reducing a sauce while cooking; the flavours were always there in the ingredients, but the process concentrates them and allows subtle details to stand out.

This approach also mirrors the methods used in professional astronomy. Large observatories and space telescopes rely on collecting faint light over long periods of time to detect distant galaxies, nebulae, and other cosmic structures. While the equipment used here is far simpler, the underlying principle is exactly the same: faint light becomes meaningful when collected over time.

Both images that I will be talking about here were photographed by me, although I have captured many others over the past few years. These remain my favourites, and I am constantly taking on new projects to photograph increasingly unique and challenging objects.

The Orion Nebula

The Orion constellation is one of the most recognisable patterns in the night sky. The three aligned stars of Orion’s Belt are often used as a reference point for locating other stars and constellations. The familiar “hunter” shape feels almost inseparable from astronomy itself, as it is on the cover of most astronomy books.

However, beneath this familiar pattern of stars lies one of the most active regions of star formation in our galaxy: the Orion Nebula.

Visually, under good conditions, the nebula appears only as a faint glow below the Belt stars. It gives little indication of its true structure or complexity. Through long-exposure astrophotography, that faint glow transforms into a detailed region filled with texture, depth, and variation in brightness.

In this processed image, the nebula reveals clouds of hydrogen gas, influenced by radiation and ‘stellar winds’ from newly formed stars. This hydrogen gas is characterised by the bright pink and purple glowing regions. Dark lanes of dust can also be seen, intersecting these regions, and these indicate areas where material is still collapsing under its own weight, potentially forming new stars.

Photo by Mihail Bin Fahad

Keep in mind, this is not a frozen cloud in space. New stars are still forming inside it right now, and will continue forming long after our own lifetimes! It’s crazy to think each star there can possibly have its own planets, its own Earth, and possibly its own alien lifeform.

As a child, I used to spend time in my garden trying to remember the names of each star in the Orion Constellation, giving them nicknames based on their colour and brightness. Maybe that is why the Orion Nebula became the first deep-sky object I ever photographed; it felt familiar, like something I had known long before I truly understood what it was.

M81 and M82

The first intergalactic object I ever imaged was the M81 and M82 galaxy pair (The Orion Nebula is in our own galaxy, so it isn’t intergalactic). The M in the names stand for Messier, after the person (Charles Messier) who catalogued them in 1775. 81 and 82 are just based on the order of numbering in the catalogue.

These galaxies lie roughly 12 million light-years from Earth. That scale is difficult to truly imagine, but it means the light captured in the image left those galaxies long before modern humans even existed. It is strange to realise that the light hitting my camera sensor tonight began its journey 12 million years ago!

Visually, these galaxies are far beyond naked-eye visibility. Even through small telescopes under good skies, they can be difficult to distinguish. In single exposures taken during imaging, they appear as faint smudges barely rising above the background noise.

And this is why this project was my most ambitious project of the time, requiring me to point my camera at this target for over 20 hours! This was achieved by pointing my camera at the same point of sky for multiple nights in a row. However, after stacking many exposures and carefully aligning them, the beautiful and intricate structure of these galaxies was revealed. The process is gradual: first, a slight brightening in the centre, then faint extensions, and eventually distinct galactic forms.

M81 (The galaxy on the right) appears as a well-defined spiral galaxy, with a bright core surrounded by smooth, curving arms. Its structure suggests a relatively stable system of stars and dust arranged in a clear spiral pattern, similar to our galaxy, the Milky Way. Nearby, M82 (The galaxy on the left) appears very different. Instead of a calm spiral structure, it shows a stretched and irregular shape with dark dust lanes cutting through its core. Though the dark lanes are not very prominent in my image, the irregular structure of the galaxy can easily be seen. That irregular structure exists because the two galaxies are pulling on each other gravitationally, triggering huge amounts of star formation.

The fact that two galaxies this enormous can distort each other across millions of light-years, while appearing as tiny, faint shapes in an image, really highlights the scale involved.

Photo by Mihail Bin Fahad

I chose to image M81 and M82 because they are relatively bright galaxies and appear close together in the sky, making them a strong first step into galaxy imaging. They also provide an interesting contrast: one smooth spiral structure and one highly distorted galaxy.

It still feels surreal knowing that, from my own garden, I managed to photograph a galactic interaction happening 12 million light-years away.

Conclusion

After spending time imaging and processing such objects, the night sky no longer feels like an empty backdrop.

The sky itself has not changed. What has now changed, especially with recent advancements in imaging technology, is what can be extracted from it.

In that sense, astrophotography does not just record the night sky. It reveals how much of this beautiful universe was hidden in plain sight all along.

What appears as darkness often holds more than it seems at first glance. Galaxies slowly turn over over millions of years, or clouds of gas give birth to new stars. It is a reminder that even when something looks empty, there is often structure, change, and brand-new possibilities hidden within it. And I think, in many ways, that is not too different from real life, where meaning is rarely immediate, and often only appears when you take a closer look.