David Maynard has an ambitious photographic goal: “to shoot everything in our reality, from below us and around us to above us.”

The Florida photographer has been obsessively focusing on the “above us” niche for the past few years, collecting telescopes, specially designed filters, and star-mapping resources to photograph astronomical objects in the heavens. “What drives me to do this kind of photography is how humbling it is to be able to look both at our time in space and our scale in space,” he says. “For instance, just consider the sheer scope of it all. I look into the Orion nebula and see those little stars that have just been born—yet many of them are bigger than our own sun. If you placed our little tiny planet into the center of that nebula, we’d barely be a tiny speck of dust—you wouldn’t even see us. Or I’ll take a picture of a quasar or some distant star getting ready to burn out, and I know that what I’m looking at could have disappeared a million years ago—because it can take that long for the light from that star to get to us so that we can photograph it.”

Maynard acknowledges that astrophotography can be both a challenging hobby (“in my opinion, it’s the most complicated kind of photography, in which I still have much to learn”) and an expensive one if you go all out. “A quality solar filter, for example, can be $100 to $500,” he says. “And a larger midrange telescope can easily be in the $10,000 range with the needed accessories. But the beauty of this type of photography is that you don’t have to get into it that much—there’s an easier way.”

To achieve his own astral imagery, Maynard uses a couple of different telescopes with a polar mount, but he also “piggybacks” his DSLR onto one of the scopes so that it moves in unison with the telescope; he’ll also simply use his camera on a tripod for lunar and solar shots. “The lens I mostly used for this type of photography until recently was the Tamron 200-500mm Di lens,” he says. “Now I’ve also started using the new 70-300mm lens, which is phenomenal. The focusing ability on it is just outrageous. I have an expensive telescope that can get what’s called color fringing with the very bright stars: I’ll get a purple glow sometimes around the edge of a star instead of a nice white glow. The 70-300 lens, though, has such amazing color rendition, that it doesn’t seem to fringe at all and add any color.”

Maynard does much of his stargazing right from his own driveway, but he suggests finding as dark a venue as you can so you can see as many celestial objects with the naked eye, binoculars, and your camera as possible. “One of the most amazing things you’ll be able to see with the naked eye is the Milky Way,” he says. “You can use a wide-angle lens in some locations and just fill that frame with the dust and the cloudy light formations. The 28-300mm Di lens, for example, is perfect to pack the frame with.”

To cut down on light interfering with the object in front of your lens, he suggests waiting until your target is at or near zenith (when the target is coming up to the highest point in the sky it’s going to reach); you get more light pollution the closer the object is to the horizon. “The Orion nebula, for example, at this time of year for me in my location nearly reaches a perfect zenith—it’s almost directly over my head,” he says. “That way I get less of the light pushing off from the ground.” He also recommends a light pollution filter, which blocks out the rays of light created by tungsten and mercury vapor that emanates from streetlights—one of the largest contributing factors to light pollution.

To figure out what you're going to shoot, Maynard recommends several resources. “One of the things that I find invaluable is a smartphone/iPad app called Starmap Pro,” he says. “Using your smartphone’s GPS, the app figures out your latitude and longitude and then fills you in on the objects that are visible on that particular night, what time they’ll come up over the horizon, and so forth. Once you click on a specific star or other object in the program, you simply hold your phone up into the sky—it literally guides you with arrows as you’re moving your phone until your phone is pointing right at the object you want to photograph.”

If you don’t have a smartphone, Maynard suggests making a trip to your local bookstore’s astronomy section. “Every year, there’s a new star map book that comes out,” he says. “Usually on the front page, there’s a rotatable piece where you can basically dial in your locations—it gives you a map of what the sky should look like near you at different times of year. There’s also a book called The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide by Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer. I love this book: It’s written very clearly and helps you through many of those steps that might frustrate you otherwise with this type of photography.”

Once you have your astrophotography agenda set, Maynard advises to let your camera acclimate to the outside temperature: “If you’re going out into a warm night and coming out of air conditioning, set your camera on the tripod outside. Don’t even turn it on—let it sit out there for 15 minutes until the sensor reaches the outside temperature. The same if you’re coming from a warm house into cold air. If there’s a difference between the ambient temperature and your sensor’s temperature, you’ll get a noisy shot.”

Other accessories Maynard recommends: a long lens hood to act as a dew blocker, a special strap powered by a 9-volt battery to warm the end of your lens (“it works kind of like the windshield defogger in your car”), and a small flashlight with a piece of red gel placed into it. “If you’re out in the dark shooting and need to make an adjustment, like move your tripod or change out your lenses, you need light,” he explains. “If you use a white flashlight, it ruins your eye’s adjustment to the night sky; you have to wait several minutes before you can see well again. If you use a flashlight with the red gel inside, that won’t happen.”

For pictures of the sun and moon, Maynard uses mostly autofocus and mounts his camera on a tripod. “For these types of shots, I like to use the 200-500mm lens extended all the way out to 500mm—it’s hard to even take terrestrial shots at 500mm and handhold, so I need that tripod,” he says.

For beginning astrophotographers, Maynard recommends starting with lunar shots, including lunar eclipses. “For full moon shots, use a circular polarizing filter if possible to darken the moon a bit,” he says. “The full moon is so bright: When you look at it through your eyepiece for a couple of seconds, then look away into a dark area, you can’t see anything out of that eye. That brightness affects your exposure, too; you lose definition. With a polarizing filter, the exposure may be a little longer, but you get more of the detail, the contrast and the features of the moon, so it doesn’t look all hazy and white across the surface.”

The beauty of a lunar eclipse also can’t be overlooked. “The moon appears red when it’s100 percent eclipsed—it's amazing,” Maynard says. “I shot this lunar eclipse sequence as individual shots, with the compositing done in post. These were shot using the 200-500mm lens at full 500mm at f/5.6, 1/250th of a second, ISO 100.”

Solar eclipses are huge celestial events that often draw throngs of eager skygazers—but for those who desire to capture our giant star through their viewfinder, Maynard offers a critical word of caution. “Never look directly into the sun through your camera,” he says. “If you do so with a long lens, it can instantly cause eye damage and possibly permanent blindness. You’re magnifying light, like when Boy Scouts are taught to start a campfire using a magnifying glass—the light is concentrated into a tight beam of light, which heats up very quickly and can actually start a fire. The same holds true for a large magnification scope or lens: It magnifies the light into a fine pinpoint and comes out your eyepiece.”

To safely shoot a solar eclipse, you need to place a special solar filter over your lens. “You can also get the same type of filter for larger telescopes,” Maynard says. For his solar eclipse sequence shown here, Maynard shot the individual images at f/5.6 at 1/90th of a second, ISO 100.

To get deep-space shots (e.g., constellations, nebula), Maynard uses manual focus and very long exposures to pick up even the faintest faraway bodies. “To shoot deep-space objects, you have to be able to track at the rate that equals that of the spin of the earth,” he explains. “With the naked eye, you look at a star and it pretty much looks stationary—but it’s not, and the camera will capture that movement in just a few seconds, Then, when you look at your photo if you haven’t tracked, that star isn’t a little pinpoint anymore—it’s a white line.”

To ensure you nail your timing, it takes experience, a little research, and some trial and error. “The other night, for the first time, I was able to do a single 15-minute exposure of deep space with no star trailing,” says Maynard. “I was jumping up and down in my driveway.”

For finding deep-space objects, Maynard also employs a technique referred to as averted vision. “If you stare directly at a very faint object in the night sky, you may not see it,” he says. “But if you stare just slightly to the side of it, it comes into view better. The rod cells (or photoreceptor cells) in the retina are more sensitive to light.”

For his shot of the Orion nebula, Maynard used his Tamron 70-300mm lens fully extended to 300mm. “That white haze you see, as well as that foggy red and blue, is made up of gases,” he explains. “I had to piggyback my camera onto the telescope and track for this image. I shot five exposures at 120 seconds each at f/5.6, ISO 100. I then stacked them and cropped after edit to an 8x10 format.”

For a shot of the Pleiades star cluster (also known as the Seven Sisters constellation), Maynard also used the 70-300 out to 300mm and the same piggybacking/tracking method. “There were 10 exposures of 180 seconds each,” he says. “I then stacked the images in Photoshop and lined them up perfectly. In each of the layers, I then went a little less on the opacity in each layer: The first layer, for example, was 100 percent, the second one 70 percent, the third 50 percent, and so on. By stacking and adjusting the opacity like that, you’re getting rid of any noise that would have been in the image. There can be a lot of noise from light pollution in the area and the temperature of the sensor when you’re taking the picture.”

Maynard then applies what is called a “dark frame.” I use the same 180-second exposure, except I cover my lens—that maps where any hot pixels are on your sensor,” he says. “I apply that in my layers as the final subtractive layer. It actually corrects most hot pixels. I then do a thing called stretching, where I use levels: I make the darks darker while simultaneously bringing up my mids a little bit. After doing that four or five times, everything just bursts out of the image.”

Maynard encourages other photographers who are just starting to venture into this photography niche to stick it out despite its challenges. “It can be complicated, but at the same time, the higher level of challenge and the beauty of what you can capture once you’ve achieved it is an absolute adrenaline rush,” he says. “When I get that shot in the sky, I can’t describe the feeling I get.”