Star photos

[jaygpoo]

Last night the sky was at last clear and I set up to look at Amdromeda . Having found it with out the aid of computors I wished to try and capture what I was seeing on my canon 500D. I am a novice so lets not tell lies. I was unable to see anything throught the viewer and the live view was the same . Just a black screen. I tried the angled attachment that I have for the viewer and zoomed in x2 but still nothing. Back to looking through the EP . I then tried shooting off a few shoots at 800 iso /1/25. Followed by a 20sec time lapse. Oh I forgot to say that this was through a Tal 100mm Refractor on a EQ5 mount but at present no drives. All to no good as the 20 odd shots turned out to be just black . So my question is that tonight I am just going to photograph some bright stars by way of practice. What settings do you suggest I use an how do I know its in focus if I can not see in the camera. I have a focus mask by the way. I know that without a tracking motor the shots will be streaks but I can try and hand track for now. I just want to be able to get shots of sometime other than planets which are great fun but deepspace is not easy for newbies when there is no practiable help at hand. Thanks

[Auntystatic]

I think you might be better off with a 300mm lens at the lowest f number you can, f2.8 f4 f5.6 etc and lots of longer exposure shots all stacked one on top of each other with a free program called "Deep sky stacker", there is so much I could write here but you would be better off going tho this part in the forum and reading through the tutorials there, as they teach it better than I could.

Live view is very good for focusing. Here is a post about photographing Andromeda it will give you an idea of the settings (80 shots @iso1600 180seconds each)

[jaygpoo]

Many thanks for your time. I did manage to shoot some stars last night and will be doing some reading tonight as directed. Jay

[Tinker1947]

I found the liveview on my 1100D works with stars down to mag 9, but at that brightness or lack of it, the camera need to be very close to perfect focus, brighter Stars will show up when the focus is quiet a long way out, so its not Liveview not working with the dim stuff it need to be very close to the focus point to start with....