Capturing the stars !

[Jeffowashere]

Cool link nerwin, definitely a ton of amazing pictures there, just caught myself browsing through them for a good 15 minutes lol

 

[BananaRepublic]

Right I haven't bothered reading the other posts so its up to you how you want to rate it. The settings you mentioned should work.

Your lens is fine for what you want to do but I know nothing about your camera cause I have a Nikon and I have been inculcated into thinking Canons are crap

1. Before you go go to your camera settings and turn down the brightness on the LCD screen to the lowest you can see it. Also make sure you know how or assign a button to give you a 2/5 second delay after you press the take photo button or if you have a remote shutter release know how to turn it on in the camera.
2. Go before it gets pitch dark so you now what your doing bring a flashlight incase/anyway.
3. Try to pick an area that has the least amount of light pollution.
4. Use Manual mode and nothing else
5. Open the aperture to the widest possible something like f4.5 or 5.6 on that lens.
6. Use live view to focus your lens on something far away, turn off autofocus and do the thing manually and don't turn it back on. this can also be done using the brightest star you can see again in live view and once this is done thats it unless you up-scuttle it,live view can be turn off after.
7. You mentioned shutter speed, 1" 5" 30" the " symbol refers to seconds the shutter stays open 1" means the camera shutter will stay open for 1 second 30" means 30 seconds. use the 10' to 30" ones to use "Bulb" you need a shutter release.
8. Once you pressed the take photo button don't touch the camera until the cycle is finished thats why the you want the delay mentioned in point 1 as a slight nudge can a mess of a long exposer.
9. Others probably mentioned using low ISO, 100 to 400, thats garbage you want to go for something in the region of 1800 and up. the best way is to try whats suggested and see what is better.
10. When your looking at the photo review on the LCD zoom in on the stars a much as you can to see how sharp they are if there not at all then the focus is wrong.

 

[TCampbell]

I was browsing on Flickr this morning and came across this guy that does astrophotography...I am mind blown. This guy is incredible! Highly recommend you check out his album, its very inspiring.

The details he captures are just amazing. I think he uses a modified Canon 5D and a 500mm lens. I'm sure it must be paired with a high end telescope.

Astrophotography Flickr - Photo Sharing

Those are what I think of as classic astrophotography... the imaging requires a polar-aligned tracking mount. In each of the photographer's images, he indicates the camera, mount, and the number of "lights" (normal images), "darks" (same duration and settings as the "lights" but with the lens covered), "flats" (images taken of a plain, evenly illuminated field to detect lens or telescope image vignetting because these images will be aggressively "stretched" in post-processing and that will exaggerate the vignette effect -- the effect needs to be subtracted from the image before it is "stretched"), as well as "bias" frames (measures the amount of information read off the sensor even when no image was taken (shortest possible duration image just to force the sensor to power up and then read-out without capturing an image. Any levels above this "bias" level represent either signal (image data) or noise.

Narrow-field images typically require auto-guiding. Wide-field images do not necessarily need auto-guiding if the mount is reasonably well-aligned.

Often the imager will use a cooled CCD imaging camera (names like SBIG, Apogee, Finger Lakes, etc.) and these are monochrome cameras but a filter wheel is used to capture LRGB (luminance, red, green, & blue filters) and sometimes additional narrowband filters are used (Ha, Hb, O III, etc.).

But this imager (who does impressive work) is using an assortment of cameras including a 5D III, a 7D, and a modified Rebel T3 ("modified" means he did surgery on the camera and removed the IR filter. It's usually replaced with a better IR cut filter that allows more of the visible spectrum collected because a normal terrestrial filter cuts a significant amount of the Ha band.)

Single images will be extremely "noisy". The point of taking lots of images and stacking them is to knock back the noise. Sometimes (as is the case with his shot of M42) multiple sets of "lights" are shot at different exposures. M42 has a very bright core and faint outer nebulosity. The faint areas need long exposures to capture, but that blows out the core. Hence you can think of it like an HDR image (not the same technique though -- but the same idea.)

He doesn't say what software he uses to handle image integration. There are several. The best imager I know uses Photoshop (and really only Photoshop), but there are guys who use PixInsight, Nebulosity, MaxIm DL, and many others... there are even free programs like DeepSkyStacker.

The skill takes years to learn. I've managed to become fairly good at image acquisition, but I still struggle with image processing.