Newbie help

[Martmomo]

Hi all I have a Canon EOS 100D with an EFS 18-55mm lens and I also have a tripod. I want to take photos of the night sky. What are the best settings to use through manual mode? I take it auto is out of the question but it seems take attract more colour and light!

[damnut]

Hi Martmomo,

I am not an imager, but if you want to take more than star trails you need a mount that can 'move' or 'track' with the sky. You need to first stop the flash from operating. if you experiment with shutter time, and set iso to 400 or 800. If poss use a remote release so you do not impart any shake.

If you are living in a heavily light polluted area, be prepared to have a heavily 'oranged'  sky. There is a book called 'making every photon count' this is well worth reading before spending any cash.

[Geordie mc]

Without a tracking tripod or mount you will be limited to quite short exposures to avoid star trails unless you actually want that effect where everything rotates around the pole star. It's a case of trial and error really. Try quite a high ISO setting of around 1000 use a cable release and mirror lockup. Start with around 10 seconds then check the result. If not much is visible try 20 seconds and so on. Taking lots of frames and stacking them in something like deep sky stacker will help with signal to noise ratio. Also take some dark frames, same exposure as your lights but with the lens cap on and some bias frames, again cap on but this time fastest exposure your camera can manage. All helps to eliminate artefacts and noise when you stack. Something like the vixen polarie or ioptron skytracker will let you take much longer exposures without trailing. Both are around £300 and people are getting 2 minute exposures easily using short focal length lenses.