[smithcorp (Brian)]

Hi all

I'm heading out to a dark site in western NSW with my family at the end of September, to show the little ones the Milky Way and get in two nights of observations using our new scope (planned to be a Celestron Evo 8) and binos (weather permitting, fingers crossed).

While there, I'd like to capture some images of the Milky Way using my Panasonic DMC-ZS7 - a sort of point & shoot camera I used to take HD videos while gliding. It has a 'starry skies' setting that I'd like to try out, but it can also take shots with manual settings.

It's a 12 mega-pixel camera, with a 25mm-300mm zoom, aperture range f3.3 to f6.3 and adjustable shutter speeds out to 60 seconds. ISO sensitivity is 80, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600.

The starry sky setting will set ISO to 80 and allow me to choose between 15, 30 and 60 second exposures.

If I whack this on a tripod and give it a shutter timer to minimise any vibration, do you think I could get some reasonable shots? I figure I'd try 15 and 30 second exposures (longer than 30 secs I thought I might get lines rather than dots for the stars), but any thoughts on likelihood of success?

Also, would appreciate advice on settings to use for manual shots rather than its automatic starry sky setting. I assume from my limited reading, I'd go for f3.3, ISO 1600?

thanks for any advice.

smith