![]() ![]() For these fantastic images, the technique used to capture them is simple. To catch the trail, however, you need to spend one hour or more. You must want to capture that perfect moment as a professional photographer does. In fact, what is being recorded is the rotation of stationary stars and the earth as it rotates. Highly recommen… twitter.Have you ever seen those pictures of stars shooting across the sky in big arcs? Or the whole sky spinning? What you see is a star trail. Perhaps the best video available online which provides an unbiased summary of the #Cyprus problem. The second picture was taken facing South East – same settings, slightly less painful shooting procedure as I only took about 75 images. These images were later stacked together using a simple freeware program I downloaded from and then imported the image into Photoshop for some minor touches (contrast and sharpness). What followed was an excruciating hour and a half, where I manually took 140 consecutive pictures using my remote cable release (guess who just ordered an intervalometer!). After being satisfied that I had everything where I wanted them to be, I set my camera to Manual mode and dialed my settings to ISO 400, F2.8 with a 30 sec exposure. I set my camera with my Canon 24-70 F2.8L lens on my trusty tripod and took a couple of pictures to make sure my composition was correct. After recently having read a couple of tutorials on star trail techniques, I was itching to give it a try.įor this first picture, I located the North Star (Polaris) just before it got completely dark. I was invited a few weekends ago to join a couple of astronomy enthusiasts up in the mountains (Amiantos area) for some night-sky watching. Shot with my Canon 60D and my Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 DC HSM lens, at ISO 3200, F4.0, 35 secs. Here is the result of my second attempt at the Milky Way with my new Sigma lens. Time is key here, because you want the shutter to stay open for a longer period of time so that you can record as much light (and hence more detail) as possible without at the same time capturing any trail. The trick here is that the closer you zoom into a star, the easier it is to detect the trail of the star caused by the earth’s rotation. At its widest setting (10mm), this lens can stay open for nearly 40 seconds on an APS-C camera such as my own, without capturing any trails. ![]() This lens is great for landscapes, but it is equally good when it comes to astro photography. Prior to my trip to Italy this summer, I mentioned that I had purchased a Sigma 10-20mm ultra wide angle lens. The night however didn’t completely go to waste. ![]() Unfortunately I failed miserably, as the lens and technique that I ended up using, didn’t really cut it. This time around I had high hopes of getting a shot of the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest galaxy to our own, which around September starts showing up in the early night hours just above the horizon. Earlier in September I headed out again into the wild on a dark moonless night, for another round of astro photography. ![]() Last June, I blogged about my first attempt at capturing a shot of our own galaxy – the Milky Way. ![]()
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