sorry, total noob

[ANolan1985]

right, im totally new to this so this is probabably going to sound stupid

i want to try and take some pictures of stars, galaxys and anythig else i can find.

i have a nikon D60 (not the best camera i know) and i need some help picking out a good lens for it that would be good for shooting the night sky. also any tips anyone could give me would be great too

thanks

[Nexus 6]

Hi ANolan, not really an imager so can't really advise on the lens. I guess you have a tripod and a remote switch for shooting? That will at least give you some steady pics.

Alan

[MoonMadAsh]

eerm me no image dood either maybe set the exposure to 30 secs or maybe 20 secs use a peice of card put it in front of lense press the go button remove the card this helps with the expose not picking up vibration ( as seen on stargazing live ) look up on youtube or even go to the thread u are bound to find something.

not much help but ey every little helps adios !

[prbaxter]

you could also use the timer to delay the shot whilst you press the shutter button. I do this with a 2 second timer and much success in limiting vibration.

[neilm]

Welcome to SGL.

Okay so tripod, remote switch or using the built in timer delay should get you started. As for which lenses, aperture settings and exposure lengths I would suggest trawling through the images in the Imaging Widefield section, this should give you a good idea of the kit / setting people use.

Cheers

Neil

[Astro_Baby]

Sorry cant help on your question but welcome from me

[E621Keith]

ANolan1985, what lens do you have at the moment? You will need a lens with good manual focus and have a stable a stable zoom or a prime. The 18-55mm is no good because the focuser do not stay in place, 18-200 suffers from the zoom collapsing.

I'd use primes if available. A 50mm f1.8 prime or 100mm f2.8 macro both stop down to f4 or 5.6 will do a decent job for taking pictures of constellations and star trails. If you get a XX-48mm step down ring, you can use standard 2" astronomical filters.

If you are loaded, the 58mm NOCT and the new AFS 35mm F1.4 were designed with night imaging in mind, since they were corrected for coma you can use them almost wide open.

The D60 belongs to an older generation of Nikon, so you should not use ISO higher than ISO400. You will need a steady tripod. A remote trigger like the Nikon ML-L3 will be required if you want to take long exposure more than 30sec.

[BobTheSaxon]

Hi ANolan1985,

I think you will also need to put the camera on an equatorial head on something like a barn door type tracker ( a cheap, build it yourself system from two pieces of wood, long (piano) hinge and length of threaded rod, but still good), or more expesive is the Astrotrak - see FLO, otherwise you will be limied to short exposures or have to accept streaky images as the stars etc move across the lens on longer exposures. Tracking the stars will allow you to accumulate more light and see dimmer object, especially if you can get away from light pollution. There must be info on the WWW on what the field of view of lenses for your camera are, and to put this into perspective the full moon is 0.5 degrees.

Hope this is some help.

Welcome to SGL, by the way.

Bob

[ANolan1985]

thanks for all the help guys, i took note of what was said on the BBC stargaze live.

ive always being intrested in astronomy and its thanks to the show ive thought about trying to take some photos and see what i can get.

i have a tripod (and a piece of card)

the lens ive got it is AF-S NIKKOR 18 - 55mm 1:3.5-5.6G, the zoom on this is not enough to focus on a small piece of sky.

I'm going to check the lenses suggested and see what i can find.

If anyone else has any other tips or lenses/equipment they could recomend would be great

thanks people

[ANolan1985]

i doubt this is going to help in anyway but i have a 'AF FISHEYE NIKKOR 10.5MM 1:.8 G' too. i doubt this will be good in anyway as its a fisheye.

also am i being stupid in asking is it possible to add a lens onto the end of the lens i have now to improve zoom?

im no camera pro but i thought i'd ask

thanks for all the welcome messages too

[ANolan1985]

sorry for replying 3 times in a row but ive just seen something about attaching my camera too a telescope.

what are the best ways to attach i camera to a telescope and is it possible to do it with the Nikon D60 (telescope adapters and such)

[astronymonkey]

Hi ,

Id just start simple and go from there.

As a starter just point it at the sky on auto setting and see what you get, then start playing with the settings....

a higher ISO will give a more sensitive sensor so will pick up an image quicker but at the expense of a more grainy image. A longer exposure (upto 30secs on a standard d60 I believe) will gather more light.

I wouldnt bother with a fancy lens when you are first starting, you need to learn with what you can do with what you have before you can see the benefit of something better. A wide angle is good as it doesnt need tracking as much as something with a higher magnification where images speed across the frame.

With a D60, as Keith has said, a remote control is essential for longer exposures as the camera only allows the longer exposure exposure settings to become active once the remote control mode on the camera is active. (at least that was what you had to do on the d40)

And Bob mentioned a barn door (or scotch mount) which is easy to make for under a tenner and will allow you to track for about 10mins using a 18mm lens and give nice wide field tracked views.

So, give it a go with what you have already and see what you get !

Cheers,

Astro

[E621Keith]

i doubt this is going to help in anyway but i have a 'AF FISHEYE NIKKOR 10.5MM 1:.8 G' too. i doubt this will be good in anyway as its a fisheye.

also am i being stupid in asking is it possible to add a lens onto the end of the lens i have now to improve zoom?

im no camera pro but i thought i'd ask

thanks for all the welcome messages too

Fish eyes is great for whole sky image, e.g. milky way, meteorite showers, and star trails. Standard and small telephotos lens such as 50, 85 and 100mm can be use for constellations. The problem with the 18-55 is not the zoom range, but the focuser. My Mk1 version's focuser would collapse under its own weight if the lens is switched to manual mode, may be they fixed the problem on the Mk2 (D40, D60 kit) or may be not.

[ANolan1985]

just had my first play about at shooting to sky from my roof. theres a lot of light polution as im on the middle of sheffield but i noticed slightly left and a bit higher then the moon is a blue glow.

anyone know what it is?

does anybody have any tips on how to make the images better or anything? i didnt take note of what settings i used cause i was just trying out different things to see what i could capture so i dont know what i had it on for this.

thanks for all the help above too, i can tell im going to enjoy continuing photographing the night sky

[rowan46]

I have noticed that imagers here are very assiduous in noting as much info as possible I assume its so they can get repeatable and improving images it may help to note exposure times etc for each picture so that you can build up a process that works for your set up . The real skill it seems to me is in the processing so if you haven't got a good image processing package this one is free its very powerful but complicated http://uberdownloads.net/apps/free-download/free-gimp-download.php?brand=uberdownloads.net&s=google&country=UK&c=uber.net_gimp&k={keywords}&pk=7042

[rowan46]

sorry just read my last post I didn't mean to imply there was no skill in taking the pics. I meant that processing took as much skill. To be frank I am totally in awe of some of the photo's here and the depth of knowledge required to get a photo looking so good.

[astronymonkey]

I think youve done a decent job there, well done.

I think the blue smudge is an internal reflection of the moon from the lens itself which is common when the moon is bright.

A great guide I can recommend is this "Nikon D60 Digital Field Guide: J. Dennis Thomas" about £9 form amazon delivered. I got it when I bought my d40 and it is basically the unofficial instruction manual for the camera and goes into all the settings it has and how to use them. I can strongly recommend it. Once you learn how to change the settings etc and how to use the various modes you will be able to start messing on with aperture and iso and take it from there.

Great first photo though, you also have jupiter in there !

Astro

[E621Keith]

I agree, that blue glow looks like a lens flare. Common problem when using photographic lens for astronomy. Modern photographic lenses have a lot of elements, in fact it is not uncommon to find telephoto lens with excess of 20. Each air-glass interface presents a surface for reflection, and the more surface you have, the more likely you will get flare.

Try to avoid scene with extreme contrast, such as shooting into a full moon.

[ANolan1985]

thanks guys

ill be sure to get the 'Nikon D60 Digital Field Guide' and have a lot of practice with different modes.

didnt realize i got jupiter in there too, where abouts on the picture is it? i knew it was visible right now but didnt know where, i was just pointing at random points in the sky and seeing what i got.

[firstblooduk]

Jupiter is just to the top left, the next brightest thing other the moon.

[themos]

The first tip is record the settings so that you can go back and find what worked!

I guess you have some PC software to edit the images, that should show you the settings used for each image: things like exposure duration (say, 10 seconds), aperture setting (say, f4) and ISO setting (ISO 800, say).

Figure out how to focus manually, there's not enough light in the night sky for the autofocus to work (or you get lucky but you want to learn what works ALWAYS, right?). Remember that the "infinity" mark on the lens is not necessarily the right setting, you may have to go a bit on either side: be guided by the size of the stars in the final image.

Then you can experiment with recording RAW images (instead of JPEG). They hold more detail that gets lost with conversion to JPEG.

See how long you can expose for (at different zoom settings) before you notice stars becoming elongated. Different bits of the sky will show more or less trailing. The least trailing happens in the sky around the North Star so learn where that is and push the exposure duration in that direction.

Avoid mixing the moon with stars, you will only be able to get detail on one or the other. To see detail on the moon, the exposure should be more like 1/200 second.

See if you can program the timer to take 10 shots, one after another, and make an animation.

[ANolan1985]

i dont have any softwear yet.

i have photoshop but is there any better programs than that for photos like these?

would doing the 10 photo sequence be worthwhile? i dont have enough zoom on my camera to see any detail on the moon or anything.

im only able to do wide shots for the moment until i can find a new zoom lens but im not sure what would be best yet

[themos]

Photoshop is good, of course.

Shooting many frames means you can do either a) an animation (which looks cool) or a "stack" (which brings out more detail). Either works great with a wide shot, just depends if you think it's fun doing.

VirtualDub does animation, DeepSkyStacker does stacking. Google them and see.

[JamesM]

In addition to the advice above, can I suggest that you read "Making Every Photon Count" by Steve Richards (FLO£19.95). It is comprehensive, concise and will advise you on what gear you need and how best to use it in order to achieve the quality of image that you are after. I'm afraid the BBC slightly over stretched themselves on the imaging section in the first programme by including some deep sky images (galaxies/nebulosity) that you can not obtain using a camera sat on a tripod. The light (data) from these objects is so faint, that you need to be able to accurately track the object across the sky for some time so that you may capture enough light from them in order to construct an image from this collected data. This is where the expense comes in because there is no cheap way of accurately tracking an object whether you are using a solid reliable mount or a small telescope that locks on to a star by constantly making adjustments to the mount's motors (auto guiding).

Having said all that, I liked your widefield shot and thought it was pretty good for a first effort. I'm not an imager but I observe with people around me who are and there are a number of free programmes out there that can help deal with 'noise' from the camera's sensor, to darken the sky etc. It might be an idea to post a quick question over on the imaging section to see if the imagers there can recommend any good stuff for you.

Clear skies and keep up the good work!

James

[jleach29]

I shoot with a Nikon D40 with several lenses depending on what my target is. The 2 main lenses that I use are a nikkor f1.8 35mm (you can find them for about $200) and a Sigma 75-300mm (they say zoom is doom but have managed some good pics with it). with the 35mm I average ISO 400-800 and f2.8-f3.5. start with just fixed tripod shots till you figue what works you can a lot of data in an image in 8-20sec without star trailing. If you want to shoot at 75mm or above you will need tracking of some sort like a barndoor mount or tracking mount, and if you want to mount your camera to a scope you will need a T Adapter kit. feel free to check out my photos on my profile here and if you have any questions about shooting with a Nikon feel free to message me on here. sorry for the super long response.