Astrophotography has exploded in popularity over the past decade, thanks to ever-improving sensors, automated tracking mounts, and processing software that practically polishes your stars for you. But in a digital world obsessed with data, sharpness, and pixels, I found myself increasingly disengaged.
So I did something most people would call insane: I started shooting deep-space photos on film.
For the past year, I’ve been experimenting, troubleshooting, and obsessing over a practice that feels more like alchemy than photography. The results? Sometimes beautiful. Often frustrating. Always rewarding.
Here’s what I learned.
Why I Shoot Astrophotography on Film
I started astrophotography in 2017 with a humble Canon T5i from Target, gifted by my dad. Since then, I’ve shot more digital astro than I can count. But after years of pixel peeping, noise reduction, and stacking the same nebula 500 different ways, the magic wore off.
After being immersed in digital astrophotography for years, my excitement began to fade. Modern digital astrophotography for me lacks excitement and is not as engaging, plus the editing is tedious. My good friend Rogette says that modern astrophotography is basically “brain rot” – “You click the button and see what happens on the screen.” Of course, this was an exaggeration, but I agree that digital astro feels trivial and can be a monotonous task. Film, on the other hand, is raw. It’s mysterious. It’s slow and unforgiving in all the right ways. Nobody’s really doing it anymore, and maybe that’s what makes it so engaging.
What Film Stock To Choose
The biggest enemy in film astrophotography is reciprocity failure. The longer your exposure, the less light your film actually records, unlike digital sensors, which scale linearly. For example, you could be shooting ISO 400 film, but after a few minutes, it would effectively turn into ISO 25 film.
From my tests, these modern emulsions stand out:
One film I don’t recommend is CineStill 800T. While it’s beloved for urban night photography, it’s a poor fit for astro: excessive red halation and grain swamp the detail. In one photo, it looked like every star was wrapped in neon fog.
Ultimately, I prefer low ISO films for their finer grain, which holds up surprisingly well.
Neither of the images above has been digitally edited. It looks like the Acros has much more detail and signal compared to Ektar 100.
In this photograph I used CineStill 800T, I find this film stock undesirable for astrophotography because of the red halation around the stars and large film grain.
Equipment for Film-Based Astrophotography
Camera Selection
My main body is the Nikon F2, a mechanical tank that doesn’t rely on electronics. Why is that important? Because electronic film cameras love to die mid-exposure. My friend’s AE-1 program only lasts about 2 hours on bulb mode with a full battery.
And don’t forget a shutter release cable. Trust me.
Lens/Telescope Selection
Forget your dreamy vintage glass with swirly bokeh, astro requires precision.
Fast, modern, wide-aperture lenses (f/1.4–f/2.8) are your best friends. Another key consideration is minimizing optical aberrations, particularly coma, a distortion that causes stars at the edges of the frame to appear blurry or stretched. To ensure sharp, pinpoint stars, it’s important to choose a lens with minimal coma and astigmatism. I recommend Lenstip.com, which offers detailed lens reviews and scores for aberrations like coma. Their ratings help identify lenses that perform well.
If this is your first time trying Astrophotography with a 35mm film camera I would highly suggest skipping the telescope. A telephoto lens—say, 135mm or 200mm is cheaper, easier to find, and often better corrected than entry-level astro scopes. Small telescopes in the $500 price range fail to support a fully corrected 35mm imaging circle.
This was one of my first shots after buying a Pentax 67. I find that the 6×7 format is a little too wide for my taste at this 400mm focal length. The 6×7 negatives are gorgeous, but pairing it with a long enough telescope that covers the format? That’s a $10,000+ endeavor I’m not ready for… yet.
Mounts and Guiding: The Backbone of Astrophotography
A high-capacity equatorial mount is essential when shooting on film. These mounts track the stars as the Earth rotates, keeping your subject centered during long exposures. With digital, you can check your results immediately and adjust if tracking was off, but film doesn’t offer that luxury. There’s no feedback loop. You don’t know if your shot worked until days later, after development and scanning. This makes precise tracking absolutely critical.
Even the slightest vibration, gust of wind, or mechanical drift can ruin an exposure that took hours to capture. I’ve shot in 25 mph winds before, something that would slightly blur a digital image but completely destroy a film frame. A sturdy, stable mount and tripod are your first line of defense.
To combat this, I use an autoguider, which is a small telescope and digital camera mounted alongside my film setup. This system makes real-time corrections to the mount’s tracking by locking onto a guide star and compensating for even the smallest deviations. It’s the only way to ensure sharp, pinpoint stars over multi-hour exposures. Without it, you’re gambling every shot.
Trust me, there’s nothing worse than spending two hours on a single frame only to get a streaky, unusable mess because your mount drifted.
More Challenges of Using Film for Deep Space Imaging
Focusing is a nightmare. Viewfinders are dim, and precise focus is essential. For lenses, I set them to infinity. But on a telescope, it can be much more difficult. Usually what I do is focus on a bright star, or even the moon if it’s out. If you’re still having trouble focusing I would suggest a magnifying chimney hood and a Bahtinov mask for getting pinpoint stars. This Bahtinov tool helps you fine-tune focus based on diffraction spikes.
Sky quality is also very important. The darker the better, for most of my photos I drive 3 or more hours away from city lights. This ensures I get the most signal without any sky glow. Sky glow often appears as a hazy, milky gradient that washes out stars and deep-sky details. Below is the Bortle scale, this scale measures how bright your sky is. I typically drive to a Bortle 3 or lower if I can. Light pollution maps are available online to find the darkest area near you.
The Moon and planets are so bright. They can easily be seen from heavily light-polluted areas, which makes them great for getting started with astrophotography.
Finding Objects in the Night Sky
The way I find objects is pretty easy in this digital age. I use my autoguider to find the thing I’m looking for. This technique is called plate solving. Basically, a digital camera takes a photo of the sky and based on the pattern of stars in the field of view it can determine exactly where you’re pointed at.
Once the computer knows where you’re pointing, it can make corrections or center any object of your choosing. This is very helpful if you don’t know where something is or you don’t know what it looks like. A lot of these objects are not bright enough to be seen with your eyes through the camera’s viewfinder. If you don’t have plate solving you would have to use a star chart and find the object based on the reference point of nearby stars, this technique is called star hopping.
Modern astro setups are packed with automation: built-in intervalometers, autofocus, target switching, and more. These are all the advantages you lose with using an old film camera. When I shoot I start a timer on my phone and manually close the shutter on my camera. This is all at the expense of a good night’s sleep. Trust me, it’s not fun driving home 200 miles when you’re out of it. Eventually, I want to get an interval film back for my Nikon F4 (MF-23), but I don’t like dealing with batteries.
Post-Processing Film Images
I like to push my images +1 or +2 stops during development. This helps bring out more contrast and shadow detail, which is crucial for deep-sky targets. Then it must be scanned to bring it into the digital realm. I typically don’t do much to my photos, but programs like Siril allow me to fix weird gradients from my lab’s scans and Siril can also fix color issues with astro images.
I normally notice a lot of images have a green tinge to them. This is usually caused by the different reciprocity failures in each individual color layer of the film This is removed in a program called Siril with the “remove green noise” tool. I try to stay mostly true to the negative. A large reason I like analog astro is because I don’t feel the need to overprocess the image like I do on digital.
The image above has a minor color correction after being scanned by Legacy Film Lab in Tustin, California. They’ve consistently provided high-quality scans with accurate color and minimal dust, making them my go-to choice for astrophotography negatives. If you’re looking for a reliable lab that understands film, especially for more technical work like astro, I highly recommend them.
Final Thoughts
Shooting film in the age of CMOS sensors and AI noise reduction feels like learning to sail a wooden ship in the era of jetliners. It’s slow. It’s clunky. And it teaches you more than any YouTube tutorial ever could.
It’s not better than digital, it’s different. And for some of us, it’s exactly what we needed to fall in love with astrophotography all over again.
I’m still just scratching the surface. There are even stranger astrophotography techniques out there; dry ice-cooled cameras, gas hypersensitization, pre-flashing, and even infrared film.
So this year, I’m going to try some of them out—and I’ll report back. Stay tuned.
About the author: Kai Longridge is a photographer based in Los Angeles, California. You can find more of his work on his website and Instagram.
