You might find that some of your night sky shots turn out just as you had imagined. But commonly some might not be quite as anticipated – and you wouldn’t be alone. Even professional astrophotographers and NASA’s space telescopes sometimes struggle to snap the perfect shot straight from their cameras.

So how do they manage to achieve the jaw-dropping pictures and award-winning photos we see?

Fortunately, there are a few tricks in astrophotography to transform average shots into truly stunning images, and anyone with a computer can take advantage of these at home.

While each individual photo taken with a camera might not be very sharp or bright, especially if the object is extremely far away or the conditions aren’t ideal, adding together lots of photos can produce an altogether finer result. You can of course take multiple photos with a stills camera, but shooting a short film using a webcam instead can very easily give you hundreds or thousands of individual frames to play with.