Shooting the night sky

Synax

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Well I'm quite the beginner and trying to learn more and more about my camera.

I got a Cannon EOS 40d

I have an EF100MM F2.8 MACRO USM
Also an ultrasonic 28-135mm

I got a polarized lens and ultraviolet.

I bought a tripod today and I'm planning on going out one night and shooting the night sky and most likely driving around and just hopefully getting some awesome shots.

Questions:

1. Can I achieve beautiful night shots with this camera and with what I have?
2. What are the best settings for night time shooting?
3. Is a time remote control or something of that sort needed?
4. Any tips??

I'm still trying to get the hang of the lcd options.
 
1. Yes
2. Depends on whether you want star trails or pin-point star images, AND how much light scatter you have.
3. Again, depends on #2 above, but usually a remote shutter release is a very good thing to have.
4. Manual focus (no AF). Manual exposure. Use the widest aperture you've got. Use the highest ISO your camera can give you without unacceptable amount of noise. Shoot in a dark-sky location, preferably on a clear night with no wind, no mist and no moon. Turn off the IS if you have it. If you want star trails, then shoot many relatively short exposures (20-30 seconds), and stack them together using any number of softwares available to do this. If you want pin-point star images, then be aware that the earth rotates 15 arc-seconds every second, and there's an emphirical formula that tells you how long you can keep the shutter open before the trail of stars start to show: It's 600/focal length for a full-frame camera. So if you use your 28mm side, with a crop-sensor camera, you're looking at about 14 seconds. with a 135mm focal length, you're looking at about 3 seconds.
 
yeah this is a pretty broad question, there are many types of astrophotography. Do you want deep sky images, pin point stars/ milky way photos, star trails, etc.
 
One other consideration - star images by themselves can be pretty boring (except for hard-core star watchers), so you usually have to think about the image you want to convey, with something in the foreground, something in mid-ground, and then the stars as the background. The gentleman above (jsecordphoto) has some very nice images posted on this forum. There are other members who posted their night shots and discussed how they achieved them - so use the search function to find those images.
 
Thanks for some of that info guys. I'm most likely going to find a rural area around where I live. I know a couple places where it's pitch black and at night you can see all the stars.

I'm also going to go to the city at night and take city pictures... hopefully it will look good.

But I want to take pictures like this...
 
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As a matter of forum protocol, please do not display pictures for which you don't own the copyright. Linking to the site showing the image is acceptable.

Once you've taken care of that, we can discuss how that photographer achieved the look.
 
A 100mm lens provides a somewhat narrow-ish angle-of-view -- about 12º x 8º. If you don't want star-trails, you'd get about a 4 second exposure on a stationary tripod -- but that's not really long enough to collect much light. If you do want star trails, of course you can shoot longer (and typically you shoot a bunch of 30 second images and use software to merge them.)

Very wide-angle lenses will let you see more of the sky and that also means you can shoot longer single-frames without noticing star trails.

You can use a tracking mount to get longer exposures times and there are a number of these ranging in price from around $400 to about $900. The tracking mount is set up so it's rotational axis is pointing at the celestial pole. By doing this, as the Earth rotates from west to east, the motor is slowly rotating from east to west -- canceling the Earth's rotation and holding your area of sky in position. BTW, the camera can be pointed in any direction you want (the camera is mounted to a ball-head type mount so you can point it anywhere.)

Night sky images are always heavily processed... so you'd want to invest some time to learn how to process the image (what software to use, and what sort of adjustments you'd want to make to bring out the details, etc.) The images that are straight-out-of-the-camera won't look like the stunning images you may have seen elsewhere.
 
You're going to need a wider lens. If you're using a crop sensor camera I'd suggest looking into the Tokina 11-16
 
Well I've been experimenting and... i can't get that crisp detailed photo. They're kind of blury lol.

imgur: the simple image sharer

Your focus is not exactly right, and I think, given the shape of the star images, that you didn't turn off the IS function. That function "jiggles" the lens a bit at the beginning of the exposure, which is then visible as a wider "blob" at the left side of the star trails. You also left the shutter open long enough to allow the stars to trail.

As Tim Cambell noted earlier, after the image is acquired, a LOT of post-processing work is done to extend the visible detail.

Ruifo listed some excellent introductory links, and it will well be worth your while to study them.
 
I need to check what the IS function is ha. And yeah I was thinking about lowering the shutter by a couple seconds or something. Experimenting with it.
 
IS is image stabilization. This is activated by a switch on the lens. When using the lens for astronomical shooting turn BOTH the AF and IS switches off. Focusing is done manually - but since it is difficult to see much under dark conditions, I usually use the "live-view" function to focus on something at the horizon, using the 10x magnification as a focusing aid. Once you have the focus acquired, don't touch it. You can also use live-view to focus on the brightest stars.

Also, do not change the focal length of your zoom lens after you acquire focus. For your purposes, until you get the hang of it, you're probably better off using the wide-side of the zoom, at the 28mm setting. This will allow you to expose longer without causing the stars to trail (up to the 14 seconds I told you about earlier).

It will also help us help you if we know the exact settings of your exposure: ISO, shutter speed, focal length, aperture, whether you have turned AF and IS off, whether you are using long-exposure noise reduction, etc.
 
Ah, yeah my IS was on.

As of right now..

IS: off
It's on MF
30 second shutter
ISO: 1250 (I've been messing around with it... because I thought the blur was because of the ISO)
F3.5 (As low as it goes)
Imaging: Raw
Landscape
AWB
The focus is on infinity
ISO expansion: on
Long exp. noise reduct: off
High ISO speed noise reduct: on
 

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