beginners star trails attempt & q's

[cjpops]

Hi all,

Trying to familiarize myself with a new 600D Canon and here's my attempt at star trails photography.. the lens is a Tokina 11-16..

about 3.5 hours worth of images processed in StarStaX. (800ISO, f8 & focus to infinity)

Any suggestions on how to get the actual 'colors' out of the stars from the SLR rather than bumping up the saturation in Pixelmator? (or photoshop)

Wondering if i need to play around with the white balance in the camera setup or ?? The canon camera seem to have worst noise at over 1600 ISO so i stayed at 800ISO unless there's a way of getting around the noise problem at 1600+ ISO..

Also, I would like to capture the milky way without any trail effect - is there any way of doing this? will i need some sort of tracking mount - i've only got a 12" dob with no tracking and this is obviously not suitable..

Any tips would be appreciated! :)

[astronobob]

Cool, I like your composition Craig, good show yep )
Sorry, cant help you out with any tips, Star trails I have not attempted much of yet ? ? Tho with star colours, apart from saturating them, Level and curve adjustment should also establish a stronger colour signal, speshly in the appropriate channel, eg R, G, B, or other ?

[Forgey]

Thats a nice capture Craig.
For capturing the milkyway with out star trails you most likely need tracking unless your thinking of doing a time lapse which will also look pretty cool.

[cjpops]

Thanks for the feedbacks :)

Was going to do another star trail photo tonight with a different white balance but the clouds started rolling in..

What are your method of doing the star trails Paula? Im still working with 30sec exposures.. Thinking of modding my 600D to get more iso controls.. (Magic latern firmware that is.)

I think i better attend the next astro camp an see how others do their astro photography..

[Forgey]

I try to capture about 700 images due to battery life, iso-800 about 20-30 sec exposure.
White balance is set to custom and all settings manual.
I then use Startrails http://www.startrails.de/html/software.html to to create the startrails then process the image in CS5.

[cjpops]

Thanks Paula, i'm thinking of getting an after market battery pack to get more than 400 images (raw and jpeg).

Im running a mac so looks like im stuck with StarStax for now.:lol:

[Adelastro1]

Hi Craig,
Nice shot. There's not too much wrong with that! You are getting some nice star colours - blues, yellows, reds. Yes one way is to use Photoshop to bring them out a little more, but you don't want to overdo it. It depends on your lens too, what do you have? If it's good quality it should produce better colour plus be sharper, have less coma, CA and maybe be faster therefore letting through more light.

Even though I use Nikon D7000 this should be standard across most cameras -

For my startrails I use:
- widest angle lens (12-24mm at the moment)
- a high ISO (1600 min up to 6400 - my low camera noise is great!)
- lens wide open at f4 (I don't have any faster lenses yet but when I do I probably won't use the lens wide open (lowest f-stop) because they are less sharp, have come problems etc).
- 30 sec exposures (which is the max limit of most cameras and so stars aren't elongated in case I want to use a single shot of the series for something else)

Since you said your Canon isn't great with noise at ISO 1600 you can remove some of this with software AFTER you have made the startrail, such as with Noise Ninja which adds on to Photoshop. Also, do you have a High ISO noise reduction function on the camera? If so set this to high. On my camera there is also a Long Exposure noise reduction function too but setting this to 'on' doubles the exposure time (it effectively takes the equivalent length dark frame photo and takes that away from the image you took). This is no good for startrails, but is ok to use for single shots.

To get Milky Way shots with no star movements you can either: increase the ISO (and deal with the noise somehow as above), buy a faster lens that collects more light or track the stars and do longer exposures (a shutter release is needed).

The first trail below is a 2 hr composition of 30 sec shots with ISO 3200, f4 with processing in Startrails then Photoshop (still need to remove dead pixels in PS).

The second trail below is 165x 30 sec shots with ISO 3200, f4 with processing in Startrails then Photoshop and Noise Ninja.

I hope that helps a bit!

Wayne

[2stroke]

You can make a eq platform for your dob which would be great for the milky way and low mag ap work. I'am currently working on cooling a 1100D and yes the cannon entry level camera's arn't great at 1600+ but the same goes for any camera in the price bracket IMO. You can build a cooler box which will give it a good aided chance and I've seen some crazy results with the 1100D at iso 3200 once cooled. Like the above poster said using dark's will help rid the noise once processed. Just google dark frame subtraction batch this will help you buy not going through each frame by hand, prey adobe lightroom soon does this :)

For the milky way why not try a barn door tracker, cheap and easy to build http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_door_tracker a quick google with barn door tracker plans will have you going in no time.

[luigi]

About Star Trails:

I think you started really well. You should see my first star trails :-)
You can take some dark frames after finishing the capture, StarStax accepts dark frames to reduce noise in the final shot. You can try at 1600 to see if that helps.

About color:

You can tweak the WB of each RAW file using the sky (for example) as a neutral point. You can also take a shot of a gray card and use that as a WB reference. Then convert all the RAWs to TIFFs and stack them.

About the Milky Way:

With your Tokina 11-16 you have a great (super) lens. Shoot at ISO1600 F2.8 and test 20 or 30 second exposures checking for trails. Then you can take several shots and stack them with Deep Sky Stacker.

I wrote a small article that might help here: http://theamazinglight.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/stacking-night-landscapes-with-dss/

[pixelsaurus]

Re barndoor trackers, this is a fairly comprehensive site for DIY.
http://www.astronomyboy.com/barndoor/

[iceman]

Excellent first shot! Well done.
Luis is spot on.

You don't need to stack if you don't want to go down that path. Just take a 30s exposure @ ISO1600 pointed at the milky way :)

StarStax > StarTrails!

[pixelsaurus]

Thanks for that. Back to my multiple Lovejoy shots on the beach. Cheers.

[Meru]

I also third Luis. If you want more saturation, I find it best to do it in Photoshop, as increasing saturation within the camera makes the picture look horrible (Atleast on my old D80 :P). I like your foreground, makes for an interesting change from the usual landscape/trees. Good work!

[cjpops]

Whoa! Lots of tips now..

Thanks everyone - really appreciate your comments and suggestions, will hopefully do another star trail tonight and post it back here.

[cjpops]

Here's one i've done tonight (jpeg files only) - it's about 4 hours long with a setting of 1600 ISO, f2.8 and 30 secs. It does indeed bring out more stars!!

It was a little over exposed however - I should have checked the view screen before hand and reduce the exposure to 20secs or so. The final image was adjusted (levels) to darken the detail a bit..

All up approx 470 images (16gb memory card ended up being full)

I will play around with the raw file soon and see if i can achieve better results from that.

:thanx:

[iceman]

I'd reduce the ISO rather than the exposure time.
If all you're planning on doing is star trails, and not a timelapse, then lower ISO with longer exposure will be better.

[luigi]

The most important thing for a star-trails photo is a nice foreground element. That's difficult to get!