An amatuer problem

[Stefan Novak]

So I've been experimenting this past week with taking pictures of the night sky with a DSLR camera on a tripod. However I'm having a lot of problems.

Very simply, I can't take a picture, it just won't do it.

So today I set my camera up to take a picture of the Orion constellation, I can make out Betelguese and Bellatrix in the focuser quite clearly. But it still won't take a picture.

Another problem is taking a picture of the full moon. Today was the first clear night in days and Jupiter is extremely close to the moon, so I hoped for a great picture of the two of them together, however I kept getting massive glare.

The settings I use are:

ISO 800-1600

F4.2 (lowest it will go)

Exposure varies

However, I do live in north London where light pollution is nuts... But I can still see the constellations, but maybe the camera can't? I'm hoping to go to the countryside in the weekend to look at the stars, so hopefully if I can learn how to take photos at night, the weekend will be even better!

And reading this back I sound quite angry - rest assured I'm not! Just frustrated :] but wasn't expecting great results in my first few weeks, but not expecting the camera to not even take a picture.

Thanks in advance!

[JamesF]

By "won't take a picture" do you mean that the camera doesn't operate the shutter? What sort of camera is it?

James

[Matt Scunthorpe]

Is everything set to manual focus, rather than automatic? This includes the Manual setting, and on my dslr, there is a switon the front of the body to alternate between manual and automatic

[Photosbykev]

A typical exposure for the moon will be 1/500sec @ f8 ISO200 so you are over exposing by a lot. This exposure is the same regardless of the moon phase

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

[J_M_Franklin]

I can concur with Kev's exposure comments above..yook me blooming ages of experimenting to find the ideal settings for the Moon years ago...and that was with a film camera..cost me a ruddy fortune in wasted 35mm roles. Eventualy settled on ISO200, F7 to F9 and faster that 1/400th of a second with around 1/500th giving best results in a DSLR...also, if you can get one, use a Moon filter as this reduces glare regardless of camera settings.

[toxic]

had a go myself at the moon and jupiter theses are the settings i used and the iso was a mistake but it worked ?.

30 frames with canon eos 400d at f5.6. 1/3200 sec. manual focus. iso 1600. 300mm lens. auto white balance. 8pm ish 28-11-2012 and the finale image after manual stacking in paintshop pro 8 then put the final image in registax to use the wavelet to bring out more detail (for some reason registax nor dss would stack them)

i am happy with it and hope some of the settings help some times mistakes work out lol.

[Stefan Novak]

Hey guys. Thanks for the responses

I finally got it working, turns out it was set up right but the lens was on auto focus, totally forgot. So embarrassing, haha.

Thank you all

[Matt Scunthorpe]

Ive done the same thing - Thats why i suggested it haha.