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Canon EOS m100 beginner night sky photo

Started Jul 19, 2020 | Questions thread
R2D2 Forum Pro • Posts: 26,528
Re: Canon EOS m100 beginner night sky photo
4

Sittatunga wrote:

KatherineS wrote:

Hi, I bought this camera a few months ago and I love it. I haven't tried taking astrophotography photos yet, but with the comet neowise out I was really hoping to try. I went out the other night but whenever I tried I would get an orange warning. I've been doing some research online and is the best way to take it using the 15-45 mm lens using the settings f3.5, 18mm, and ISO 1600? Currently that's the only lens I have for it and even if it's not great for this type of photography I would still like to capture some type of image. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

It will be tiny at 18mm with a short exposure. Last night was the first time I saw it (clouds all last week) and from my urban location I needed binoculars to see it. The but I could see looked quite small in 10x binocular due to the brightness of the sky hereabouts this month. Over the next few days it will be crawling West below the bottom of the saucepan part of the Plough. Manually focus at 10x magnification on a bright star and check your focus on a dim one. You can possible manage 7 seconds on a tripod at 45mm or 17s at 18mm before the stars trail too noticeably. If you take a few dozen of these exposures you can stack them in a free program called Sequator which will line the stars up and reduce the noise so that you can brighten the image enough to see more detail. Have a look through the astrophotography talk forum here for more tips.

+1 I'd mention that you do need a tripod of course.  Turn OFF the image stabilization.  Use the self-timer.

Here's what it looks like using a 32mm focal length...

4 seconds (Rule of 200) @ f/1.4, ISO 400.  Northwest sky, about 10:15 pm.

Shoot wide open, use the ISO to determine "exposure."  Or stack, as was mentioned.

Best of luck!

R2

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