Hi!
I am currently taking advantage of the clear sky tonight in Sydney and what looks like a good few days of viewing ahead thanks to the lack of clouds.
I am very new to photography, and while I wait for my astronomy gear to arrive to learn on that front, I'm going to get into "milky way" photography, or basically just photos of the night sky, to practice stacking, blacks, post processing etc.
Anyway! I currently own a shiny new Canon 600D with the twin lens kit (18-55mm is and 55-250mm is) and i'm looking for a bit of help setting it up.
I've read most of the manual, so i'm familiar with the camera well enough, and according to various guides I want to be looking at an exposure time of no more than 30 seconds, ISO of about 300 and aperture of f/2.5 - 3.
Now, first question - what settings should the white balance be on? When I change them, I get VERY different results. Auto seems useless, and I can find no guide that tells me about it. Second question - the largest I can set my aperture to is f/4 - is that a limitation of my lens? (Sorry that must seem like an obvious question!) Is there any way to help with that? I read that a higher ISO may help?
The rest is just practice from what I understand. Getting the right combination of the above depending on how the conditions are that night. Once I understand what the white balance is all about, and the aperture vs. ISO I should be able to understand what's going on!
Actually I think i've answered my own question! Did some deeper googling and found this post http://photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00MMhy - basically, as long as i'm shooting in RAW, the White Balance setting is only going to really effect the preview on the back of the camera, and that's about it - as it wont be applied to the image (as it would with a JPEG) when saved to the camera.
Does that sound right? Any other tips to do with night sky photography would be much appreciated!
The maximum aperture you have available is specific to the lens. In general, the more you pay for a lens the wider it's maximum aperture. However, for astro work it often pays to close the aperture a few stops from wide open. You collect less light, but it more than pays off in image quality.
Also, higher iso will give you greater sensitivity so more light collected per unit time, but at the cost of higher noise in the image. The best iso to use is usually either 400 or 800. But it will depend on the temperature of your cameras sensor at the time.
Hi Gareth. I presume you're proposing shooting off the tripod, while waiting for your astronomy gear to arrive. If that's the case, use a high ISO because you need all the light you can get in the shortest possible time. ISO 400 & 800 won't really cut it. Use stacking to bring the noise down. If you bring your aperture down a stop or two from wide open as adman said, you'll improve the image quality considerably in relation to the stars in the corners of the frame for a little loss of light, assuming you'll mostly be shooting at 18mm in the 18-55mm kit lens. At 18mm and shooting the Milky Way through Scorpius & Sagittarius, aim for 25-30 sec subs - longer and the star streaks will become noticeable, even when you reduce size a bit while processing & 'prettying up'. Polar areas of the sky are a bit more forgiving in sky motion.
If you want to zoom in, you'll have to cut your times down. 10 sec is just OK at 55mm for around Milky Way Central, but at say 200mm you haven't got long at all!
Good luck with it - look forward to seeing some of your results!
I did something similar whilst waiting for my toys to arrive too
If you haven't come across it before, "stacking" is a really cool technique that lets you shoot at much higher ISOs than would be otherwise possible.
Here's a quick example that I did... I found that I could just begin to see the Eta Carina nebula in my photos at ISO 6400 x 1 sec (any longer resulted in star trails), but it was very low contrast and noisy - basically a useless image.
I took a sequence of 17 consecutive shots and ran it through Deep Sky Stacker (freely available online) which removed the noise and made the nebula more visible (after levels adjustment / histogram stretching).
Oh, and one other thing... if you happen to take exposures around 1/4 sec to 2 seconds in duration, it's worth using the Mirror Lock Up feature (it's in the camera manual). Here's a pathologically bad example with a heavy lens. Shorter/longer exposures than this usually aren't affected.
Wow, thanks for that! Those comparison pictures have given me hope for my washed out looking photos and I have been using DSS to stack shots, taking blacks and flats and such to reduce noise.
I have also been using Canon Utilities to control the camera directly via USB cable - WOW what a help that is! I dont even have a standard tripod yet, I just had the camera proped on the windowsill while I sat on the floor practicing different settings with the laptop. The preview on the laptop is remarkably similar to the final shot when you switch the settings - really impressed.
The moon was VERY bright last night, and was pretty much dominating every shot I tried to take with the 18mm. Unfortunately due to my location, my balcony can only see a limited amount of the sky - to the right is a horrible yellow street light, to the left is the city, directly upward are some power lines and then in my only usable spot of the sky was the bloody moon!
So anyway I decided to take a photo of that instead using the 250mm lens. Not bad for my first photo of the sky I think? It was ever so slightly out of focus, but I think that's actually caused it to look a bit more 3d in effect.
Let me know what you think
Edit: I took the photos at 100ISO with f/5 at 1/640
Last edited by Gareth; 13-09-2011 at 08:56 AM.
Reason: Added photo settings
Now, first question - what settings should the white balance be on? When I change them, I get VERY different results. Auto seems useless, and I can find no guide that tells me about it.
Hi Gareth,
I started out the same way with fixed tripod shots. You are right about shooting in RAW. It's the best way to adjust the white balance later. I found for my very dark sky location a white balance setting of 3800 Kelvin was very good. This might not be the best depending on your skies. Also to expand a bit on what Rob_K said in relation to exposure times. I use the '600 rule' with fixed tripod work. Divide 600 by the focal length of the lens you are using to get the maximum shutter length before star trailing becomes noticible. For example at 20mm you can do a shot of 30 seconds. At your 250mm you will only be able to do 2 seconds or so. If you want to take it to the next level after fixed tripod. Google "barndoor tracker" and you should find heaps of info on how to construct and use a cheap (below $50) and simple way of taking long exposures of upto 5-6 minutes without any star trailing. http://obsidian2010.deviantart.com/a...ight-194054921 is a shot I did with a barndoor tracker last year before I brought my telescope. Hope this helps.
Thanks Greg, I think i'll look into that. I love the photo you linked below, where were you when you took that one? Did you have to stack to achieve that level of color?
where were you when you took that one? Did you have to stack to achieve that level of color?
Taken where I live on a rural property between Wagga Wagga and Albury. Single 3 minute exposure. No stacking. White Balance of 3800 Kelvin. Slight curves adjustment and slight colour saturation in post processing from memory. I got my plans for the barndoor tracker from "A Beginners Guide To DSLR Astrophotography" by Jerry Lodriguss http://www.astropix.com/BGDA/BGDA.HTM. I can highly recommend it as a great guide, although as I said you can find plans pretty easily on the net. There are even YouTube vids of people constructing them.
