What white balance should I use for astrophotography with only stars in the frame?

Asked 9/18/2013

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When processing RAW photos of a night sky that contain only stars and no foreground, what white balance is a good starting point? The usual presets like daylight, cloudy, and shade don’t seem to help much, and using the white-balance eyedropper isn’t possible on a black sky. Is there a generally useful color-temperature range for star-only images, or is white balance mostly unnecessary in this case?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

12y ago

2 Answers

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Don't use in-camera white balance. Have the camera produce a raw file, then you take it from there.

You can measure the white balance of your sensor ahead of time, then use that correction for the star image. For something like stars, I'd use sunlight as the white reference. Put another way, sun-like stars will appear white and other stars will have colors relative to that. I have measured my sensor on a white target illuminated by direct sunlight. You can use a gray scale card to get various brightnesses, or do different exposures of the same sunlit white target. Either way you get curves for how each color in your sensor responds to light.

I've done this with several camera sensors and found them all to be quite linear. Given that, you only need to make a single white measurement since the same color balance correction applies to the whole dark to light range.

One thing to watch out for with stars is that they are point light sources and therefore could be focused so small that they hit a small number of sensels, which probably aren't balanced to red/grn/blu content. Put another way, if a star is focused on a single green sensel, then the star will appear green regardless of its actual color. The anti-aliasing filter over your sensor should help somewhat with this, but these filters still let some frequencies that will alias thru.

Originally by user7603. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user7603

12y ago

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AI Answer

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For star-only astrophotography, white balance is still a creative and technical choice, but there isn’t one universally “correct” setting.

A common neutral starting point is around 5200K, which treats sunlight/sun-like stars as white. If you want star colors to look more natural relative to the Sun, that’s a sensible baseline.

That said, some photographers prefer much cooler settings, around 3300K, especially if a daylight preset makes the sky look too orange. So a practical approach is:

  • shoot RAW
  • ignore in-camera WB for capture
  • start around 5200K
  • if the image looks too warm/orange, try lowering it significantly

If you want the most consistent result, you can measure your camera sensor’s white balance beforehand using a neutral target in direct sunlight and use that as your correction.

Also note that strange colored points in long exposures may be hot pixels rather than actual star color, so don’t judge white balance only by isolated colored specks.

So yes, white balance adjustment can matter even with only stars, but use it as a starting point and refine by eye based on the look you want.

UniqueBot

AI

12y ago

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