Excellent resource for anyone interested in night sky photography

Jock Elliott

Hall of Famer
Location
Troy, NY
check out www.lonelyspec.com

There is a wealth of information there, including a downloadable guide to photographing the milky way: Nightscapes Guide

Among the other goodies that can be found there are guides to choosing a lens for astrophotography, a point-and-shoot head to head comparison, camera reviews, a milky way exposure guide, and lots more.

Highly recommended.

The guide was instrumental in helping me to capture this:

LX100_handheld_night_shot_008_DxO_Medium_.jpg
Join to see EXIF info for this image (if available)


Cheers, Jock
 
Thanks Jock, my interest has been resurrected because of a discovery in some shots from some years ago, of some fairly indistinct features suggestive of a) a nebula and b) a galaxy. I need to find those again, with a longer lens.

Edit: an easy read. I guess you need to sign up to his classes if you want to photograph other things than the milky way. I shot first with a 15mm lens and it was all very nice but it was BIG and WIDE. And thats a good thing if you want the whole milky way.
 
Sue,

Of course, the wider the lens, the longer the exposure can be before you get star trailing.

But if you want to photograph nebulae or galaxies, here are a couple of resources I have discovered that might prove useful:

Orion Nebula from my livingroom with a compact camera :-): Astrophotography Talk Forum Forum: Digital Photography Review

grelf.net - Stars with compact camera

I haven't tried the techniques described (but I have bookmarked them for later reference), mainly because I am interested in capturing the grandeur of the sky, and that requires some foreground to give it context and a wide lens is the way to go for that.

Cheers, Jock
 
When I've tried to take photos of the moon previously, I've found that I needed a very long lens stopped down by a large margin.

James,

I too have found the moon a tough object to photograph. Since it reflects sunlight, it is nearly as bright as the sun, making it virtually impossible to capture any detail if you are also trying to include any foreground in the shot.

In his book on landscape photography, Carl Heilman suggests that a good starting place for exposure when shooting the moon is: f/11 at a shutter speed that is the reciprocal of the the ISO. So ISO 100 would equal 1/100th second shutter speed.

Sometimes, if left to its own devices, the camera makes radically different decisions. I got this shot at 800 mm (e). The FZ200 exposed it at ISO100, f/2.8 and 1/1000th second.

FZ200_moon_032.JPG
Join to see EXIF info for this image (if available)


Cheers, Jock
 
Back
Top