Using a
Compact Camera
Staying with the concept of not spending any money
you can use your existing camera to take starscapes.
All you need is a camera that can take exposures up
to 30 seconds or one that has a night scene setting.
The camera should be set at the highest ISO setting
of 3200 or 6400. You will then need a tripod, beanbag
or some other form of stabilisation to prevent the
dark spot with no lights around this will give you some
lovely images of the stars, showing you far more than
you could ever see with your eyes. If your camera has
a bulb setting and a means of triggering it without
touching the camera then you can start to take longer
exposures of 2 to 3 minutes. With exposures of this length
you will start to see the stars trailing.
These star trails occur because the heavens rotate
around the celestial poles. In the northern hemisphere
they rotate around Polaris. Star trailing is something that
astrophotographers try to eliminate, but they can be
used in a very artistic manner by taking lots of images
and then merging then together to form streaking lines
any exposure longer than 30 seconds will start to show
trailing, if you use telephoto lenses then that time can
be reduced to just a few seconds.
Using a DSLR
budding astrophotographers. I used my trusty old
Nikon D300 as my main camera in astrophotography
ways to create some stunning images. The beauty of
the control that can be gai