It’s good to be excited. Just… not too excited.
Back in May, we booked a vacation to Greece, and the first thing I did was check the lunar calendar. As luck would have it, we’d arrive on a new moon — perfect conditions for astrophotography. All I had to worry about was the weather. Clear skies? Check. Gear? Packed. Plans? Locked in.
After an 800 km drive and a night’s rest, I set off for Cape Sithonia, about an hour from our resort. The last stretch of road was too rough for my car, so I hiked the rest of the way to reach my chosen spot.
The kit I brought:
- Sony a6300
- Samyang 12mm f/2.0 NCS CS
- Move Shoot Move Rotator
- Manfrotto BeFree Tripod
- Extra tripod ball head
No remote shutter this time — I didn’t feel like babysitting another set of batteries. Instead, I relied on the Camrote app as an intervalometer (it’s never failed me). The plan was simple: align the rotator, shoot a few 2-minute exposures of the Milky Way, then head back to the hotel.
And everything did go smoothly. Cape Sithonia turned out to be the darkest, clearest sky I’ve ever seen. The stars were razor sharp, the Camrote app worked perfectly, and I drove back buzzing with excitement.
So where’s the “lesson” part?
The next day, I sat down to transfer some shots to Lightroom Mobile… only to discover that none of my Milky Way images were in RAW. Just JPEGs. Why? Because the moment you open Sony’s Smart Remote app to connect your camera to your phone, it quietly switches your camera to JPEG mode. To shoot RAW+JPEG, you need to change that inside the app’s own settings.
Lesson learned: always double-check your settings. No matter how breathtaking the scene, no matter how carefully you planned, excitement can still trip you up.
Fortunately, the JPEGs were good enough for Deep Sky Stacker (now on macOS!) to work its magic. Here’s what I came away with:
The foreground was shot during the blue hour and, ironically, it’s the only one where I didn’t use Sony’s Smart Remote app. That gave me at least a little more editing flexibility. The sky isn’t bad, but it could’ve been so much better. Think of it this way: doing astrophotography in JPEG is like topping a pizza with ketchup instead of tomato sauce. It works, but you’ll always miss out on the richness, texture, and depth of the real thing.
Having said that, I’m more than happy with the result. What do you think?
