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After having spent a few evenings trying to capture some decent photos of the stars from my newly finished deck and using my newly acquired tripod I am now ready to ask for some help...

So far I have ended up with some very underexposed / noisy shots (10-30secs), or longer exposures ( 3 mins) which then start to exhibit small star-trails and symptoms of sensor heating... (all at ISO200)

Do I need to bump up the ISO to get a decent shot of a constellation? or try something in between 30 seconds and 3 mins???

What is the best way to meter for a shot like this???

This may be of some help John

http://skychasers.net/

Also look at multiple exposures and then combining in PSCS@ in HD

sirhc55 wrote:This may be of some help John

http://skychasers.net/

Some great photos on that site Chris... I'll bookmark it for later...

sirhc55 wrote:Also look at multiple exposures and then combining in PSCS@ in HD

I actually tried that already Chris, but unless you take the photos in very quick succession, then you end up with trails - or even worse dotted lines

What I'm trying to achieve is a very clear image of a single constellation... I'm coming to the conclusion that the only way is to boost the ISO, unless the experts gathered here can advise me otherwise...

The way the astronomers do it ( or at least when I was younger) was to have the telescope on a thing called an equatorial mount, set up correctly for latitude/longitude and powered by a slow motion drive which kept the object of interest centred because typically it required longer exposures.

not sure what the go is without this gizmo because with a fixed camera you have already found out that you will get star trails with longer exposures
I guess if you bump the iso noise increases?? I haven't tried to shoot stars with my d70.

If there is a simple solution, someone here will know it.

Regards Steve

Leek,

I don't think there's much else you can do. As avkomp says, your big mistake in making your deck was that you did not mount it on a series of servo motors so it would track the stars! Don't let Mrs Leek find out!

My only suggestions are (a) photograph things near the southen pole because there is less movement there (however, there's not much interesting there either!) or (b) start taking photographs of star trails and call it art!

I opted for (b) and called it science instead. This is one I did to demonstrate a method of finding south with reference to the Southern Cross. The South Celestial Pole is at the intersection of the long axis of the cross and the perpendicular bisector of the pointers. This was about a 10 minute exposure.

Very nice shot Thaddeus...

I think I need to get away from the city lights as well, coz there's a lot of ambient light in the sky.

On the next clear light I'll try boosting the ISO and see what happens...

Hi John,

as avkomp mentions, you need that equatorial mount and tracking to get away from the star trails. Big V has posted a number of photos taken via his telescope, have a look here:

http://www.d70users.net/viewtopic.php?t=8291&highlight=

http://www.d70users.net/viewtopic.php?t=8298&highlight=

And they were talking of having an Astronomy night in Adelaide:

http://www.d70users.net/viewtopic.php?t=8367&highlight=

If you want to get to do more of these, you are probably better off to go to a local astronomy club meeting, I'm sure you would find lots of info there, probably easier then going to Adelaide

HTH,

cheers,

Radar

John - don’t forget also that Killa is into astronomy

sirhc55 wrote:John - don’t forget also that Killa is into astronomy

I did remember that...
I'm sure that he'll chime in when he sees this thread... I think there are a few other astronomers here as well...

Having seen the price of some of the high end equipment, it brings a whole new meaning to lens lust...
Maybe I'll just stick to the macro end of the scale

John, if you come to the mini-meet this weekend, (8 Oct) we can have a chat about it. It will save my fingers from suffering RSI from the typing

Our resident forum astonomer Gordon at Coonabarabran (Siding Spring Observatory) is probably the best to talk about astro-photgraphy though. Anyone heard from him lately?

My lame attempt at capturing stars

ISO 400 - f2.8 30s

It's fairly cloudy tonight in Melb.