Post by martyn2005 on Aug 4, 2005 12:05:58 GMT -6
Hi All,
I tried some very basic Astrophotography last week and wasn't very impressed with the results and I wondered if anyone had any tips or advice as to improvement.
My equipment was a Canon AE-1 camera with a 50mm lens on a tripod loaded with colour print 400ASA film. I had read a few articles in books and particularly a 'beginners' feature in Sky and Telescope magazine and felt confident that my equipment was fairly adequate for the job - at least for pictures of constellations and wide field views etc.
Whilst I'm still in the dark about many aspects of astronomy I used to work as a professional photographer and so was confident about the cameras use.
I used an F setting of 1.2 and focused the camera to infinity. Then I just picked some constellations and bracketed exposures of 25 seconds and then a second of 50 secs for each shot. I thought that both of these times would prevent star trail and for the most part they did but instead of the dark skies that I was seeing the prints came back looking like late afternoon skies! It was weird. I could see the stars I had pictured but the amount of light let into the pics was crippling.
On a plus point the 50 second exposures pulled out some detail of the milky way and some colour variations in the stars.
So heres my question - how do I make the sky black AND allow enough light in to pull out the constellations properly. Everything I had read said that exposures of at least 20 seconds with my type of equipment would be necessary.
Tips please! ;D
Martyn
I tried some very basic Astrophotography last week and wasn't very impressed with the results and I wondered if anyone had any tips or advice as to improvement.
My equipment was a Canon AE-1 camera with a 50mm lens on a tripod loaded with colour print 400ASA film. I had read a few articles in books and particularly a 'beginners' feature in Sky and Telescope magazine and felt confident that my equipment was fairly adequate for the job - at least for pictures of constellations and wide field views etc.
Whilst I'm still in the dark about many aspects of astronomy I used to work as a professional photographer and so was confident about the cameras use.
I used an F setting of 1.2 and focused the camera to infinity. Then I just picked some constellations and bracketed exposures of 25 seconds and then a second of 50 secs for each shot. I thought that both of these times would prevent star trail and for the most part they did but instead of the dark skies that I was seeing the prints came back looking like late afternoon skies! It was weird. I could see the stars I had pictured but the amount of light let into the pics was crippling.
On a plus point the 50 second exposures pulled out some detail of the milky way and some colour variations in the stars.
So heres my question - how do I make the sky black AND allow enough light in to pull out the constellations properly. Everything I had read said that exposures of at least 20 seconds with my type of equipment would be necessary.
Tips please! ;D
Martyn