perthwestaustralia wrote:
This weekend I'm heading out about 2 hours from Perth, Western Australia, to get some astro shots. My friend knows a place in the middle of nowhere with zero light pollution.
I'm taking D600 with Sigma 35mm 1.4 and Nikon 24mm 2.8D. Also might take 80-200 ED.
Anyone got any good tips for getting the Milky Way, I haven't tried this before? What settings on the D600 would be a good start?
Thanks for any advice.
I got a D600 last month for this very purpose. (Upgraded from my D90)
The most useful thing I was told, from back in my D90 days but it still applies, was a "rule" of thumb. The rule of 600!
It's not 100% perfect but if you divide 600 by your affective focal length you'll be somewhere in the region of the maximum shutter speed you can get away with. My choice lens is 16mm sp 600/16 which comes to around 37 seconds.
You'll find that this is affected by angle and stuff too so is not 100% accurate but it's a good ball-park figure. I tend to scale it back again further for pinpoint stars, my last shoot had me snapping at about 24 seconds IIRC.
So you'll soon realise that the wider angle you can get the longer shutter you can shoot at which gives you more wiggle room with iso and potentially, aperture.
Naturally you want your aperture fully wide open really which means your focusing will be a lot tighter, you've got to find infinity, in the dark, manually. (Ensure your lens is capable of manual focus and infinity focus. Not all lenses go to infinity, though a wide-angle certainly should)
If you need glasses, bring them, focusing on infinity in the dark is a tricky matter, a distant light is useful if it's available but you'll need to be able to focus on it physically with your eye.
Also when you start up on a nights shoting don't be so restrictive with your ISO. The D600 is pretty good with high ISO, though i'm still quite new to it and tend to stick to ISO 800 due to my D90 experience myself.
However, bump up your ISO, way up, for your first few shots. In so doing you can do shorter shutter times, possibly even handheld, and get an idea for what you're shooting at. You can probably get your shutter speed down to 2-6 seconds, maybe less than 1 with a massively high ISO. The images will be useless for noise BUT you can see how your image composition is without waiting twenty seconds, adjusting tripod, waiting twenty seconds, adjusting tripod, etc.
Once you've lined up the composition you want to experiment with the ISO and shutter speed, bringing back the ISO as low as you can without the stars trailing, starting from th shutter speed as calculated above.
Finally, nothing to do with the camera.
Have you checked the heavens? And the weather? (I nearly always forgot my first few trips out and was frustratingly either met with full moons or cloudy skies.) And if you're going coastal, you might want to check the tides too.
To check the heavens for an idea as to where the Milkyway is and for where the moon might be grab a program called stellarium. (
http://www.stellarium.org/ ) There are alternatives, i just don't know them.
You can drop in the gps coordinates for where you intend to shoot from and change the time so you can see what is visible when and what directions you should be facing for what you want to grab.
Hope that's helpful.
