What other sources of light do you use?

The stars themselves become your source of light. DSLR cameras are so sensitive that with a fast, wide-angle lens at F2 or F2.8, you can get shots of the stars over a landscape and there will be details just from the light from the stars. It’s quite impressive. Your exposures have to be long — 30 to 60 seconds — and the ISO speed has to be 1600 to 6400.

What are some tips for photographing the northern lights?

The first challenge is simply getting them to perform and dance for you. If they start happening, they’ll be in the northern sky as a rule. The exposure should be just a few seconds, a fairly fast aperture at F2.8 or F4, and a fairly high ISO speed of 400 to 1600. You can judge from your shots if you need to increase the exposure, or decrease it if it’s a very bright aurora.

How do you capture deep space photos of stars?

You need to attach your camera to a telescope and use a tracking device that turns the camera around Polaris, the North Star, at a rate that equals the speed at which the earth is turning. You can take exposures of several minutes, and the stars won’t streak or trail — they’ll stay as pinpoints as the camera follows the stars.

What if you want to capture star trails?

One way is to simply open up the shutter for many minutes, if not an hour or two. But the more popular method is to take lots of short exposures that might be 20 or 40 seconds long. It’s easier to do that if you have a remote controller that automatically fires your shutter. With only a second or two between exposures, it just goes by itself for as long as you want, an hour or two perhaps, taking what could be hundreds of images. With specialized software or with Photoshop, you take all those images and stack them together to get the equivalent of one exposure made up of hundreds of short exposures. If you aim north, the stars all seem to rotate in circles around the North Star.

How do you capture vibrant colours in your photographs?

The camera always picks up more than what the eye can see because our eyes are not colour sensitive when you get down to very low-light levels. The camera can pick up reds and magentas in the aurora that are tough to see unless the aurora gets really bright. When you do long exposures through a telescope of nebulas, you pick up all kinds of reds, blues and magentas that your eye would never see. Those colours are various wavelengths of light being emitted by glowing gas — oxygen gas glows green, hydrogen gas glows red and blue.

What advice would you give aspiring astrophotographers?

Get out there and start shooting, even from your backyard. You’ll be hooked. Don’t worry about buying fancy gear; get out under the stars with the camera you already have and you’ll be amazed at what you can see and pick up.