Sky with M50

LillyLo wrote:

Hello, I have a quite simple -for you- question: I was on a trip, and I saw a nice cloudless starry sky and remembered the awesome starphotos i see on instagram. So I set my canon-m50 at manual mode, iso at 4000 and set my camera stable pointing at the sky (didnt have a tripod).

You REALLY need a tripod (and a decent stable one at that) for star photos. You can use the 2 second timer to trigger the shot so that you don't get vibration.

I could not press the button, although i have set speed at bulb.

No, use Rule of 200 to calculate shutter speed. If you have a 18mm lens then shutter speed is 200 / 18 = ±10-12 seconds. Anything longer and you start seeing elongated stars (star trailing).

As the camera couldnt focus with pitch dark, it was just not possible.

As pointed out above, using AF for stars is generally not a good idea. Even the newest/best cameras with fast lenses that WILL AF on stars, the focus is usually not accurate enough to produce sharp stars. MF is essential.

There must be a very simple answer, please dont laugh. Thank you

Generally I would not recommend an ISO setting as high as 4000 because it is (IMO) too noisy, but everyone has their own tolerance level for noise.

I would suggest the following as a starting point (assuming you are using something like a 18mm wide end of a zoom - change the shutter speed by using Rule of 200 if you are using a different focal length);

Aperture - the widest your lens allows with decent performance (often stopped down by 1/3rd stop at least.

Shutter speed - around 200/18 = ±12 seconds for an 18mm lens

ISO - try ISO 1600 or 3200

WB - Daylight

Then once you have some shots that barely show a star to the naked eye on a screen, spend a couple of hours enhancing the shot in Photoshop or similar using techniques as described on websites like clarkvision.com.

This is the problem with Canon APS-C cameras (perhaps to a lessor extent with the new 32Mp sensor) - they get noisy beyond ISO 1600 and with the 1.6x crop factor it is hard to get enough light into the sensor even with a fast f1.4 lens unless you are using a tracker.

As for the astro photos you see online, bear in mind that many are taken with quite specialised equipment (FF body, fast f1.4 lens or scope, tracker, mosaicing etc) and there is usually many hours of capturing hundreds of images at a distant/remote dark sky site and then even more hours to stack those images and post process them and apply enhancement algorithms etc.

Astro isn't easy and is worlds away (at least the "impressive" star shots you might see online) from a quick few snaps with the camera + kit lens resting on a table and beanbag for example.

Colin