Trying out night sky photography

Published on 04 Aug 2019
Tags: france, nightsky, photography

Besides the odd attempt to snap the moon, I’ve not really tried photographing the night sky. However, I am a sucker for those photos with star trails in the distance and a lit up tent in the foreground. Hence, I must learn!

I camped out in the field here in La Guinandie (with no rain fly - ooh what a novelty for a Brit!) and tried taking some photos of the sky at different points in the night. I use a Nikon D3200 DSLR. Here’s my first attempt:

Night one

grainy_AF ISO 12800, 70 mm, f/9.0, 5.2 sec.

Notably grainy, no thanks to that ISO. I was also too lazy to switch out my telemacro lens back to the (faster) kit lens. Nether-the-less, not terrible. I had also learnt how difficult it is to focus on the stars and did so by trial and error which was cumbersome.

I went to sleep and left the camera running a long exposure to try and capture some long star trails:

trails1 ISO 100, 70 mm, f/4.0, 1802 sec.

Again - better than expected but being too lazy to switch lens was a big fault here.

Night two

Now using the kit lens! So I can get a focal length of 18mm. I also set up my focus on the moon before it went down over the horizon. This seemed to work well to give a crisp focus on the stars but I had to be very careful not to adjust the focus while moving the camera around. I soon learnt that switching on autofocus while moving helped with this but obviously only if I did not open the shutter while autofocus is on!

moon_in_tree

In addition, we had visited a vide grenier (car boot sale) that day and I bought a solid, heavy tripod for 2 euros. This has worked tremendously well to stabilise the camera during long exposures when compared to my cheapo Amazon basics tripod.

trails_trees_2 ISO 100, 18 mm, f/3.5, 1357 sec.

I was pretty happy with this one. Still needs some noise reduction but I can live with this for now.

Night three

Night three and I worked a bit on framing a bit better. Sort of. Here are two photos not terribly well-framed but I’m happy with how the star trails came out

trails_trees_3_2 ISO 400, 18 mm, f/3.5, 773 sec.

trails_trees_3_1 ISO 100, 18 mm, f/3.5, 1802 sec.

Then trying to get the house into frame, I captured several long exposures and stacked them to create the following. I don’t have a timed shutter release and so the exposures each had different shutter speeds making stacking a bit tedious but the end result is not bad. Still not perfect and there’s things to improve on - I’m definitely hooked!

tails_over_house_gd ISO 100, 18 mm, f/3.5, 1802 sec

trails_over_house_sum ISO 100, 18 mm, f/3.5, approx. 2 hours total