As the lighter nights begin to swing around in May, one thing I like to do is fire up Stellarium and plan out all the things I want to photograph when proper darkness returns in the late summer. Almost always, the target that occupies me the most, no matter how many times I’ve imaged it, is the Milky Way. Widefield, nightscape or long-focal-length close-up - it doesn’t matter what format we’re talking about, there’s always something our Galaxy can offer.
It’s important to think ahead when it comes to Milky Way imaging. The view changes from month to month, week to week and even hour to hour throughout the night. And the best time to photograph our Galaxy from the UK, in my opinion, is the first weeks of August. Not only has astronomical darkness come back for most of us in the UK by that point, but you also don’t have to wait all night for the band of the Milky Way to be positioned close to the meridian. Plus, from a composition perspective I love how the core of the Galaxy and the swathe of its spiral arms, arcing up into the eastern sky,
