Photographing the Night Sky

[StuartDH]

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Photographing the Night Sky

As you look out into the night sky, you could be easily fooled into thinking that what you're looking at is a perfectly still scene. However, as you'll soon discover when taking photographs, the constant rotation of the Earth on its axis means that whatever you are focusing on, is anything but stationary.

Even with the most sturdy tripod, if you set your camera with exposure times over 30 seconds, you'll probably find that some of the stars in your photograph will look a little blurry. Sometimes this can create fantastic effects, especially if you set the exposure to several minutes or even hours, producing spectacular streaks of light from the stars across the dark sky. However, if you wish to get sharp pictures of the stars then you'll need to keep your exposure times fairly short -or buy some extra accessories, like an equatorial drive.

[Grantus]

Should this be in the Astronomy section?

[StuartDH]

Hi Grantus,

It's a bit a crossover, but because it focuses so heavily on photography, with tips about exposure times, aperture, digital cameras, lenses etc, most of the technical aspect of the topic belong in this section.

That said, we could maybe set it up in the reference section so that page can sit in both photography and astronomy. I'll have a look into it.

Cheers

Stuart

[Grantus]

But this is the Bird thread?