Help with Moonrise Time Lapse

[Astro_LJ]

Hi all, I'm teaching myself how to take photos of the night sky. I'd really love to experiment with a time lapse photo of a moon rise. I'm wondering how I will be able to take a sequence of photos (using the manual mode on my camera) and keep the exposure just right during the changing light conditions. Put another way, if I set my camera settings for a perfect exposure under the light conditions during sunset just as the moon turns up over the horizon, I'm wondering if my moon will be slightly underexposed as the sky goes darker? WIll it make much difference? I might be having a blonde moment but I can't seem to get my head around how I should set my exposure when shooting such a high number of frames at short intervals under changing light conditions. I'm really hoping you can help explain it to me.. Thanks in advance

[JamesF]

I've just "discovered" the APT (Astro Photography Tool) application, which allows control of Canon EOS cameras to be "scripted". That might allow you to do something along the lines of shooting a sequence of exposures at different exposure times. The problem is knowing how long those exposures need to be to start with. If you shot images manually one morning over a period of time to get some idea of the required settings then perhaps you could get it to work.

Of course that's no help if you don't have a Canon EOS

James

[Photosbykev]

The exposure of the moon won't change through the night but it is very difficult to get a balanced exposure. You need something like 1/125sec@ f8 ISO 200 for the moon but much longer to bring out the stars

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk. Blame Apple for the typos and me for the content

[Astro_LJ]

Thanks for the advice! And JamesF- I'd definitely like to try this. I have an EOS too!

[JamesF]

I hope you manage to pull it off. Sounds like an interesting and fun project.

I've been using APT (and there's another similar application called BackYard EOS, or BYE -- different people seem to get on better with one or the other) to take repeated long exposures of the Milky Way for stacking into a single final image having started out just using a programmable remote. I've been quite impressed with how easy it has made the whole process. Of course it's far easier than what you're proposing to do, given that it's just taking, say, sixty exposures of sixty seconds each without changing any settings during the process.

James

[Astro_LJ]

Well, I'm glad you brought that up. I'm very camera happy at the moment and I'd love to try that as well! Thanks for recommending. I'm hoping these pics you are referring to are in your gallery. I'd be very interested in seeing the final result!

[JamesF]

I'm still very much learning my way around and getting used to what I'm doing, so I've had far more failures than successes so far, but this is probably my favourite so far:

http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/157267-another-cygnus-widefield/#entry1593855

James

[JamesF]

Actually, I should have pointed you at a "how to" for the wide field imaging as its helpful to have a guide for starting off. I'll find it now.

James

[JamesF]

Here you go:

http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/36308-basic-widefield-with-a-camera-and-tripod/

James

[Astro_LJ]

Thank you!

[Ainsley]

Post up a picture when you manage to do it. Id like to see how it comes out, as it sounds like a good idea.