Problems using Nikon D5300 live view for AP focussing.

[Ryan_86]

Hi all, my pal has recently bought a Nikon D5300 for AP. We attached it to his Meade Lx90 to drift align. We put it to manual mode and selected live view. It failed to show any stars on screen, we bumped the iso up, focussed each way and set shutter speed l. Once we took an image the stars were showing but not in liveview. There were a fair few decent mag stars in the fov but it just wouldn't pick them up. 

I have a Canon 600D and it would pick similar stars with ease. 

Does anybody have any info regarding this?

Much appreciated.

Ryan

[LightBucket]

It will always be difficult to see stars with live view and the live view is a video mode and is taking around 30 frames a second, so the stars would have to be very bright to be seen, i too have had an LX90 and have used a canon DSLR on the back, and to focus with live view i had to pick a very bright star and zoom in with the 5x zoom button for the screen, and even then it was hard to see on the little screen so i tethered to a pc to get a bigger image...that worked most of the time, but you must use a Bahitnov mask as its even easier with one of those.

[billyharris72]

As above - I use the Nikon D3300 and on live view it will pick up the likes of Capella, Vega, Altair or Deneb without much difficulty provided the focus is good, but below that magnitude it starts to drop off quite quickly. I use a star of that brightness to focus and then use some other method to point at the target. For drift aligning I assume you are using exposures anyway, so it hopefully shouldn't affect your aligment.

[Ryan_86]

Thanks for both your replies?? Yes we were exposing for 125 seconds so had no problem but we were expecting to see these stars via live view first. I have just ordered a bahitov mask so will use this prior to drift aligning.

Thanks again

Ryan

[Luna-tic]

Do you have the LV screen brightness set low? I have to turn the brightness to max on my D3400 to see anything less than around mag 3-4 stars. Sort of aggravating, because at full brightness, the exposure data on the borders is too bright and messes up my dark vision.

I'll find a bright star near to the object I'm interested in shooting, focus on it, and then skew to my target.