How do I shoot the desert at night (astrophotography) in Morocco?

The Moroccan Sahara is one of the great dark-sky locations I know, and the secret to a clean shot of the stars is planning around the moon, not the sunset. Aim for the few nights around the new moon — a bright moon washes out the Milky Way the way a streetlight would. I check the lunar calendar before booking a desert night specifically for astro. Erg Chebbi outside Merzouga and the more remote Erg Chigaga near M'Hamid are the darkest, most accessible spots; the further you camp from village lights, the better.

The kit is non-negotiable in two respects: a genuinely stable tripod (sand swallows flimsy ones, so spread the legs wide and push them down to firm sand) and a fast wide lens, ideally f/2.8 or brighter and somewhere around 14-24mm. Camera-wise, switch to manual, focus manually on a bright star or distant light using live-view zoom, set your aperture wide open, ISO around 3200-6400, and exposures of roughly 15-25 seconds — long enough to gather light, short enough that the stars stay points rather than trails. Shoot RAW; you will recover a lot in editing.

Composition is what lifts a star photo from a science snapshot to something memorable. Put a dune ridge, a lone camel-thorn tree, the silhouette of the camp tents or a person with a soft headlamp into the foreground, so the sky has scale and a story. The Milky Way core — the bright, dense part everyone wants — is best from roughly April to September, arcing up in the south; a stargazing app tells you exactly where and when it rises on your night. A head-torch with a red mode keeps your night vision and lights foreground gently.

Two practical truths from doing this many times: the desert gets genuinely cold after dark even when the day was scorching, so pack proper layers, and let your eyes (and your sensor planning) adjust for 20 minutes before you start. Many of our desert camps are chosen for their dark skies and the camp team will happily point out where to set up away from any lamps. Cloud and the occasional dust haze can spoil a night, so if astro is a priority, give yourself two desert nights rather than one.