These photographs demonstrate the challenges and possibilities of urban astrophotography under extreme light pollution in New York City. All images were taken from Brooklyn, where night skies are heavily affected by artificial lighting and fall into the Bortle Scale Class 9 (inner-city sky).
In the first image, photographed from my backyard at night, you can see a simple foreground of polls and a wire silhouetted against the sky. Above them are the Orion constellation and the Pleiades star cluster. The bright, washed-out background clearly shows the impact of severe light pollution, which reduces contrast and limits the number of visible stars.
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| Urban Astrophotography - NYC astronomy - Orion Constellation |
The second image shows the Lyra constellation. Here, the urban foreground was minimized, allowing the stars themselves to stand out more clearly. I added constellation annotations in Photoshop to help identify the star pattern — a useful technique when imaging from bright city environments.
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| Urban Astrophotography NYC - Lyra Constellation |
In the third image, the Cassiopeia constellation is visible, again with annotations added for clarity. Even under heavy light pollution, some prominent constellations can still be captured from Brooklyn, though only the brightest stars are detectable.
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| Cassiopeia constellation - Urban Astronomy- Brooklyn Astrophotography |
The final image is a panoramic night view of Manhattan photographed from Brooklyn Bridge Park. Both the Brooklyn Bridge (closer) and the Manhattan Bridge are visible, along with the illuminated Financial District and its reflections on the water.
Although a few bright points appear in the sky in this last image, they are not stars. Under Bortle Class 9 conditions, no recognizable constellations are visible above Manhattan. Most of these bright points are likely airplanes moving through the night sky rather than astronomical objects.
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| Brooklyn astronomy - Manhattan panorama at night |
This post illustrates how urban astrophotography requires adjusted expectations — focusing on bright constellations, wide-field compositions, and creative framing — while also highlighting the dramatic contrast between natural night skies and the artificial glow of a major city.
Urban vs. Dark Sky: In heavily light-polluted cities like New York (Bortle Class 9), only first-magnitude stars are visible to the naked eye, while deep-sky objects are largely washed out by skyglow. In contrast, truly dark locations (Bortle Class 1–2), such as remote deserts or dark-sky parks, reveal a celestial masterpiece: thousands of stars, the full structure of the Milky Way, and faint nebulae and galaxies that are completely invisible from urban environments. The difference highlights how dramatically artificial lighting alters our human connection to the cosmos.
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