How to Shoot the Stars – No Telescope

Camera

As there is very little light about, your camera needs to be good in low light, and you need a fast lens, basically, one with a big aperture if possible. I took my first astrophotography picture with a Canon EOS 2000D and got reasonable results considering it’s a beginner Digital SLR. You can set the focus and the aperture just by shining a light on it. If you are shooting with a crop sensor, I’d get something like a 10-20mm lens. You can get lots of stars in the shot, you can also zoom in to 20mm to get a slightly tighter shot, so it gives you a lot of flexibility.

So, these are the steps:

1. Get your camera on a good sturdy tripod
2. Turn the mode dial to manual
3. Set the drive mode to the self-timer (s seconds)
4. Turn off image stabilisation in both the lens and the body
5. Change your white balance to tungsten (indoor or incandescent)
6. Zoom out as wide as possible
7. Select manual focus If you have markings on your lens to show you where to focus, focus to infinity, if you don’t have markings on your lens, switch on live mode.
8. Find a bright star or a light on the horizon and use the magnify button to zoom in on it, then use the manual focus ring to get a clean image. You may have to take a few images and check the focussing and change if necessary to get a good image. Therefore, lenses with a marker are better. You can see when the lens is at infinity. Then keep the focus in manual and try not to touch or knock it.
9. Set your ISO to about 10,000
10. Set your aperture as wide as possible
11. Set your shutter speed to about 4-6 seconds and take a shot.

600 Rule

There iso a rule called the ‘600 Rule’, basically you take your focal length and divide it by 600, this will give you the number of seconds you can leave your shutter open, before the stars start to streak. This is slightly different when it comes to APS-C, then it is known as the 400 rule. If you’re shooting on an APS-C sensor, divide 400 by the focal length, that will give you a maximum shutter speed. If you’re on a lens at 18mm, you’ll want a maximum shutter speed of about 22 seconds. I’d probably keep it to about 20 seconds. If you are using a full frame camera, divide 600 by the focal length. Then it’s just a case of coming up with interesting compositions and following the patterns of the moon and the stars to see what might give you an interesting sky. Sometimes if the ambient light is bright, you’ll have to drop the ISO, but not too much to lose the stars, sometimes battling with the light coming off the ground and the light coming in from the stars.

PhotoPills

There is a good App called PhotoPills, it shows where the Milky Way is going to be at any given time of the year, it shows where the Moon is, what cycle it is in, also where the Sun is. It’s good, it’s just got so many different aspects to it.