Shooting the sky at night

ccastro

ccastro

Well-known member
I can't seem to get a decent night time shot of the sky. I get a lot of noise, if you've had success doing this can you please post the exposure and iso setting you use.
I know people do time lapses with stills and since I've never done it, I'm trying to avoid that route. If you can do it with the video mode please let me know what works best for you.
Thx.
 
I'm playing around with this to. You need fast glass, lower iso, and really low shutter. I use a tripod, because the slightest movement shakes, and you get a smearing effect. Also remote to start stop is ideal. I can't give you any exact settings. I just play around with it till I get something I can live with. I'm guessing most people do night stuff in photo mode because you can use much slower shutter speeds. Like a 1/2 second to let enough light in to get a decent exposure without noise. Sorry I cant be more help.
 
No very helpful. If moving the camera causes some of the noise and stuff then i'm guilty. I will try it in the lowest iso possible and not moving it and see if that helps. thx
 
Tripod, fast glass, ISO 800 or 1600, make multiple exposures (Like 30-40) of about 15 sec (To avoid trailing), then shoot some dark frames (The same exposure times / iso with the lens cap on), some light frames (Same aperture / iso, with something to give an even exposure), and even some bias frames (Using the same iso, shortest shutter speed, lens cap on). OH, and do everything in raw.

Then download Deep Sky Stacker (Google it for the author, I can't remember off the top of my head), load everything in and follow the instructions.
 
Thanks Dave I'll give that a try. I shot it at 1250 Iso and 2.8 recently and it looked extremely noisy. I'm assuming the example settings you are proposing are stills and not video which I've heard is best for Time lapses but I was hoping to do it in video mode. I was trying to avoid stills since quite frankly I've never really used the camera as a stills camera.

Go figure, lol..

Anyway I've seen many examples of people using the stills side of the camera and then software to put them together and they've come up with some amazing results.

Thanks again I'll give it a shot.
 
You could also try on Stargazer's Lounge, an astronomy forum I occasionally post on. Not as big as Cloudy Nights, but very friendly and helpful, definitely no flaming. Ask then to keep it simple, astrophotographers can be even more obsessive than film-makers lol.

Dave
 
are you able to shoot video in photo mode to get really slow exposures then?

I've never really considered that... just shot at 1/30th and got no cloud streaking/trailing at all. If I really need a decent sky shot I just take photos for a timelapse, but sometimes its more convenient to just set the camera, push record and speed up in post.
 
If you are doing a time lapse, you are better off getting a shutter release. You can set it to take a picture once every 10 seconds or something. Then just string the photos in Final Cut, and you got yourself a wicked timelapse. Honestly it will save you unnecessary harddrive space, and it will look incredibly awesome.

Here is the pricey Canon kind: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/164271-REG/Canon_2477A002_Timer_Remote_Controller_TC_80N3.html
Or you can go down the generic route: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/749827-REG/Vello__ShutterBoss_Timer_Remote_for.html

Hope that helps a bit.
 
From my experience, if you want to get an appropriately exposed sky (at night) I would suggest taking advantage of your camera's full potential (since it's predominantly a stills cam) and shoot a time lapse . It's relatively easy to do even if you have never done so, trust me.

Even if you use fast glass there's only so much you can do before you have to grab a shutter release (remote) and set longer shutter speeds. 10 to 15 seconds should be acceptable for most cases and if it's still too dark, set for an even longer shutter. If it's noise you want to avoid, I find that if you set the ISO to around 160 or so (the lower the better but not lower than 160) you get great result with very little noise. Setting your camera to Aperture Priority from the beginning helps immensely. It will allow your camera to compensate for any light loss as the amount of light becomes less visible as the sun goes down for example.

Of course, as stated before you will need fast glass and a tripod for this process. Especially without a tripod, longer shutters will cause a smear or motion blurred effect. The final step would be to send the stills to your NLE software of choice (Final Cut Pro/X, Premiere Pro, or even After Effects etc.) and put them in sequential order which the application will do for you. Just as a side note, shoot JPEG's for less quality (will save storage space) if you want to run tests and shoot RAW's for the final result. Hope this helps.

By the way, don't take my word for it - here are some links for you to judge for yourself.

http://philipbloom.net/2010/12/16/nighttime-shooting-with-a-dslr/

http://philipbloom.net/2010/12/16/timelapse-with-dslrs/

http://philipbloom.net/2010/12/16/shooting-video-with-a-dslr/

-B
 
thanks Minktv500, yeah I have actually got a couple of timelapse remotes but for some reason I always favour the simple ease of just recording and leaving it, however you're right, it looks much better using photos so maybe I should stop being so lazy...
 
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