Canon DLSR 1100 Camera- What Can I Do With It?

[Suzy]

Hi everyone :hi:

Well I've done it....
I'm not going to the dark side, just kind of standing in the middle. :question:
I've just bought myself a Canon EOS DSLR-1100 camera.
Here (http://www.digitalcamerawarehouse.com.au/prod7339.htm) are the specs.

Hopefully if the weather behaves hubby and I plan to take both my 10" dob and camera/tripod to a dark site tonight.

Just using the camera on the tripod, I'm wandering how far I can push this camera to get some deep sky shots?
I'll be happy at whatever it produces, anything of the night sky is so beautiful. :D

I've just seen Rob K's pic of the sn in M95 and I want to do that badly, but I see he did it with a 200mm zoom lens and my camera has a standard 18-35mm lens. :question: Can I still achieve something like this (http://i727.photobucket.com/albums/ww271/Rob_Kau/SN2012aw22Mar2012text.jpg) as well?
I'm assuming it's taken straight from the camera.:question:

I have very little understanding about cameras as I'm just starting to learn, but whatever you say here, hubby will understand as has some understanding of cameras but has never done deep sky stuff with this kind of camera.
The plan for tonight is for him to be at the camera and me to be at the dob and learn what he's doing.

If I was to get a camera attachment for the dob, aside from the obvious moon and planets, can I still get some bright nebula or something? Sirius and the pup would be nice :question:

Thank you for taking the time to help me out. :)

P.S. if you can post me some examples of pics that this camera would take, that would be helpful also. :D

[Lester]

Hi Suzy, being limited to a tripod, try 800 ISO and shoot with lens wide open. With the lens at 18mm you should be able to use (at a guess) 40 second exposures without any trailing and shorter as you adjust the lens to 35mm, perhaps 20 seconds. The warmer the night the more noise will show up in the exposure. If the night time temp. is above 15 degrees, 800 ISO would be the best. If the night time temp gets down to 10 or less you could try ISO 1600.

In camera noise reduction will help also to reduce noise. I presume this model camera would have that setting in the menu.

All the best.

[Suzy]

That's a big help, thank you so much Lester! :)

[Forgey]

Hi Suzy, here are some of my pics with my canon 1100D. I know there not nebula or deep space but they were taken with the camera on the tripod.

Settings used:
ISO-800
F/3.5
30sec exposure
18-55mm @ 18mm

[Shark Bait]

Nice wide field shots Forgey. Omega Centauri is easy to locate in all of them.

[Lester]

Yes very nice results there Paula. Also for Suzy, you could do the same as Paula, and stack a number of exposures to get more depth in the image. This would work best when you are not including the forground as that will blur as the stars move.

All the best.

[Forgey]

Thanks Lester & Stu, and i never even noticed omega centauri in the pics untill u mentioned it lol

[Liz]

Good luck Suzy .. time and practice will get you there!!

If in a dark site, push ISO 1600, 18mm, for 35 sec or so. As I said on FB, focus can be tricky, so good luck there too.

I have the adapter to attach to scope but the Moon is the main object here, maybe a planet or 2, but you will need tracking to capture nebula.

Down the track you will have to tackle stacking and processing, which I am not good at (= hopelass). :help:

The pics here are single images - no stacking, and minimal processing - alter brightness and contrast only.

[dannat]

You prob don't want to know this but these cameras with single lens are on sale at some h/Norman for $397

[Liz]

Oh, no she may not want to know that. :question:

[widow18]

Suzy
Probably a bit late for tonights session, but if you have a laptop use EOS utility Remote Shooting to set the focus, makes life so much easier. You must use a bright star as a target.
Good luck.

[Suzy]

Thank you so much Lester, Paula, Liz, Daniel (*punch* :lol: ) & Pete- really appreciate all your very helpful advice and the pics you'll posted.
My apologies I took a couple of days to get back to you'll- I've been really busy.

We headed out to a nice dark spot we found some other time (during the day) which is a lovely picnic spot between Esk & Somerset (an hour's drive) and boy it looked so different at night, I was a bit spooked :rolleyes:.
When we were half way there, somewhere woop woop at a petrol station they had a sign saying free wifi so I went yipppppeeee and logged onto IIS on my phone to see if there were any tips for us and wow :eyepop: there was lots of helpful stuff, and Pete you weren't too late for yours either. We took the laptop to connect up to the camera as we'd already read it does that before I got the camera. Anyway, there we were admiring such a beautiful night... clear... still... just divine. When we got to our spooky spot, which btw even spooked me out more when Russ told me there were Rabbit shooters overhead so I'm sure I went a ghostly white :face: because I thought it's spooky enough as it is was without having people roaming around in the dark over yonder. So there he was trying to calm me down while he was trying to set up the camera. We then moved away from the water bank and closer to where the entry gate is and that made me feel a bit better.
But you wouldn't believe it, as soon as we got there and got out of the car it was blowing a huge gale. The wind was stinging my eyes :mad2: it was that bad. We got to see the milky way for probably 10 mins before the clouds rolled in. So we didn't set up the laptop to connect to the camera and the 10" dob stayed in the car. :mad2: The trusty binos got a good run though. Still it was nice to see the little we did. We took some pics anyway between gaps- the strong wind and clouds certainly didn't help our first time trying to learn. But Russ took as much as he could despite and learned quite a bit, so it wasn't a total waste of time.
Oh and btw it's really hard to decipher clouds from the milky way at first :rolleyes:, we were scratching our heads at the dark nebula :screwy:look I said, who knew there were two coal sacks :screwy::screwy:. Then it became bleeding obvious :ashamed: when the cloud got really bad. That was my first viewing of the milky way and cloud, never seen both together before (as you can see we don't get to see the milkyway all that often :lol: ). Sheeez talk about feeling like a total newbie. :lol: And I can't believe I'm admitting this publicly on the internet :rolleyes:.

I haven't put our first attempt shots up - well I wanted to but Russ didn't,:lol: because there was so much wrong with them- it didn't help with the wind blowing around the tripod. :rolleyes: We weren't given a good enough chance to really present a first pic, but would have loved to have done so tho.

Daniel, eeeeeeeek. Liz is right, I didn't want to hear that :lol:, that was such a good buy. I bought this camera second hand (6mths old and still under warranty) from Gumtree (my first Gumtree purchase) after watching the classifieds for weeks. Plenty of people on there selling them second hand for around the $500 mark. When I rang WOW when they were having their supposedly big closing down sale a couple of weeks ago, they wanted around $600. So I thought if I could get it for around the $300 mark i'd be very happy. Sheeeeez would have been happier getting at Harvey Normans, doh!

Paula, thanks for those pics, there terrific! And so glad someone else on here has got the 1100 so I can ask questions about it.

Liz, those widefield scenic shots with the milkyway overhead is exactly what I want to do (or make Russ do :P ). Could you please tell me what the settings were for those shots and what lens you used? I wonder if my camera is capable of doing the same thing :shrug:.
That pic with the eclipsed moon over the water and the house in the field are amongst my favourite pics of all time I just love them so much.

[RobF]

Good luck with the astrophotography Suzy. During the comet Lovejoy visit I was pleasantly surprised to learn more about what a DSLR on a tripod can do. Won't cost anything to experiment and most people put up quite a bit of detail about f stops, exposure times, etc here.

You could probably do some video planetary work with the 1100D on the 10" too with correct adaptors.

[Liz]

What a night, but shame re wind and clouds, and men with guns :help:.

Thank you for your kind comments Suzy :).

Your camera can certainly do this, easy!! It will take awhile to get used to all the settings but you will get there. I have never connected mine to the laptop, tough keep meaning to. I always find focus a pain, even with Liveview on a star and magnified. Will have to give it a go on the laptop.

Those images are wide open, so your lens at 18mm, ISO 1600 for about 35 sec .. thats it babe. You can look at stacking down the track (though am not great at that). I shoot mainly in Large format, occ RAW, but many will swear by RAW. My hero (Rob K) takes amazing images, and doesnt use RAW. ;)

Photoshop is the popular King of processing - and I am trying to get my head around it. I use Media Impression - a photo program that came free with one of my cameras,and I use it 90% of the time. A quick tweak with contrast/brightness//crop - easy, then resize to post. Your images are about 4000kb, so resize/reduce down to about 800, save and post.