Thenu

Thanks a bunch for the responses. A few of you asked the purpose of this project - we had a few options to choose from but due to the lack of time we went with taking photos of identifiable constellations. I'm still in my first year so these are very simple projects. Nevertheless I'd like to get better at astrophotography. Life would so much easier with a tracking mount but I think deep sky stacker has an option to align photos? I'm not too sure.

I'm doing a uni astrophotography project and we were given a very simple Canon Powershot 490. I attached pictures we took last night (with just the camera). Camera settings - ISO:1600, f/3.0, Shutter Speed: 15s. I noticed that there seems to be a lot of grain/noise in these photos and that they are not very sharp. Is there any way to minimize this problem? From what I researched, I think I need to try reducing the shutter speed and stack multiple photos with something like deep sky stacker. I just want to know whether I'm heading in the right direction.