How To Take Pictures Of Stars With Digital Camera

A camera with manual controls manual control of your iso and shutter speed are going to be essential for photographing the stars.

How to take pictures of stars with digital camera. If it appears out of focus adjust accordingly. Setting your camera up to take photos of the stars is not too hard. You can shoot wide angle shots with a dslr camera and lens where the planet appears as a bright star or high magnification views using a dedicated astronomy camera that reveals surface detail. Any more time than that and the stars will begin to blur.

If you re after a star centric photo with little to no landscape or if you want your landscape to be dark start with the following settings. Set the lens to manual focus and the lens focus to infinity. Mount your camera on a tripod and get it set up including attaching the remote shutter trigger. Increase the iso as needed for a good exposure.

Verify that far off stars are in focus by snapping a test shot then review the shot by zooming in to the sky s brightest star on the lcd display. A wide aperture lens you ll need a lot of light and f 2 8 seems to be the butter zone for astrophotography. To photograph the stars in the sky as pinpoints of light start with as wide an f stop as your lens allows and shutter speed of about 20 seconds. What you need to take jaw dropping pictures of stars.

To take your star pictures you only need three things. How to take pictures of stars camera settings for taking pictures of the stars. You can do this with a cropped sensor camera without a tripod and without a fisheye lens. This can range from 5 30 seconds depending on your equipment and conditions.

Set the camera to manual and adjust the focal length to infinity. Attach a hood to your lens to prevent any ambient sidelight from washing out the image. An aperture of f 5 6 a shutter speed of about 15 seconds and an iso of 100 400. A rule of thumb for photographing stars is to divide 600 by the focal length of your lens.

To do this you will want to make sure your dslr is in manual mode. For example canales shot on a 20mm lens so he divided 600 by 20 to get 30 seconds. A full frame camera for better iso capabilities a fisheye lens for the widest view of the sky a tripod for stability during 15 second photos note. The result is the amount of seconds you should expose.

Combine this with an ultra wide lens and depth of field won t be a problem. First you will want to put the camera into manual mode usually m on the mode dial as well as manual focus mode usually via a switch on the lens. This setting combined with the small aperture gives you a huge depth of field.