Is their something there ?

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Professor1991

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I live in Birmingham, England and it's probably just me, wherever I am in the city, whenever I look at the sky at night, I don't see much in way of subjects for Astrophotography. The Moon is usually visible and I just see a few faint stars at best so I was wondering if this is usually the case for most people in this field and they recover details in post processing. Of course, I know the milky way (Or whatever the subject) isn't clearly visible but of the few photos of post processing I've seen, even the before photo looks to have something to build upon. Is it a case of doing composition, taking multiple photos, long exposures, etc... and manipulating the RAW to recover whatever detail you can. Is shooting at a "empty" sky worth it ?


Hopefully a reply will give me my answers.
 
It is light pollution! Where there are a lot of street lights, the stars do not show up. For astrophotography you need to be out in the wilds. That is a why observatories are built in deserts and on mountains.
 
Your first 4 words tell it all - 'I live in Birmingham'. You need to get well out of the place. Years ago I was at an observatory in Portugal with someone from Birmingham. We were looking at a supernova remnant (Messier 1 - Google it. It's in Taurus - small but pretty) with I think a 500mm reflecting telescope. This guy had never seen it before - it was impossible where he lived. He nearly fell over in amazement when I told him I could see it with a 150mm scope from my garden. For imaging through a telescope you can probably get away with slightly more light pollution than if you are going for wide angle Milky Way shots as the field of view is so small and specialist software can remove the sky background. For wide field stuff the closer to pitch black the better.
 
I've often been told to leave Birmingham ! ;)

I've often thought light pollution to call it collectively, was the main reason you never really see these types of photos with a building foreground.

Does the time of night matter ? For instance, here in England, days are beginning to get shorter again and so dark skies will be visible sooner than normal (6pm around November) so I could go out of the city and still attempt to get a astro shot at roughly 8pm or does a late night pitch back sky really work ? Is post processing the only time you find out if your efforts have been successful as I doubt out of the camera shots will showcase what you want to.
 
heading east 30 or 40 miles & finding a nice dark hill to sit on will make all the difference. Mid Wales is very good in that regard.
 
The darkest skies are after midnight when people (most people) are in bed with lights turned off and now some street lighting is turned off for a few hours (wish they'd do that where I live!). Just bear in mind that hills can be cloud magnets. You still haven't said what sort of images you want to take though I'm guessing Milky Way and foreground?
 
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