Well it was practice night for me as well tonight. Trialling a number of different setups. I wanted to go with the ED80, 2.5X powermate and 300D but got a bit much vignetting, so settled for the ED80 and 300D on their own. Knew I should have bought that 2" barlow out at Duckadang
Tried various exposures and ISO and finally settled on 1/1250 sec and ISO400. As the night goes on I can then adjust my exposure down, rather than increase my ISO.
I ran off 5 shots and pumped them through Registax. Very light wavelets (nothing over 3.8 at it's harshest), no other processing just a crop in PS.
A few things to think about on the night if you are planning on giving it a go and haven't done anything like this before.
1. I found DSLR Focus a boon when trying to get critical focus. I'm even going to use it to control the whole imaging session. I'll just check it after each capture burst and that way I can still enjoy the rest of the evening looking at other things
2. I know it may be alot of work, but consider taking 10 images closely spaced together to be combined into 1 shot with registax.
3. Watch your batteries, make sure they (plural) are fully charged. (not like me tonight and had to go to AC half way through
)
4. Make sure your memory card is EMPTY! at the start. You don't want to be having to delete images halfway through the evening. Especially if they are images you haven't already downloaded to your computer
6. Check your camera histogram after a run of images. Check what it is at the start of the session and try not to let it drop too low below that. It makes your final processing so much harder if you let the exposure drop too low. I'm planning on having mine at about 50% to start with and allow it to drop down to 25% -30% before I start to increase my exposure time.
5. If you haven't tried your hand at a long imaging session before,
wear warm clothes.
Good luck