Settings For Very Basic Star Photography from my A6000

[mmessier3]

I just recently have been learning about my A6000 and how powerful it is. Im taking a backpacking trip tomorrow with my son to the mountains to watch the meteor shower and I thought it would be great to try and capture some very basic 25 second exposures of the stars, since we will be very far away from light pollution and this is supposed to be a great event.

I have read the basics about star photography and have many of the settings in place on my a6000... except the long exposure

I cant figure out who to set my camera... specifically how to set the exposure to 25 seconds. If somebody could describe the steps I would need to take in the menu system of the A6000 I would greatly appreciate it!

Thank you

 

[muvovum]

just set your camera to M mode and turn the back wheel or the top dial until you get to 25".

 

[1sol3ss]

It depends what lens are you going to use and 25 seconds could be too long if the lens it's not very wide and the stars may show trails instead of being points of light.

There are several good tutorials online for Astro photography, may be worth checking them out.

 

[BBQue]

Also learn how to MANUAL FOCUS on infinity.

Test all this (and your exposure settings and aperture and ISO) the night before you are heading out. Don't forget to bring a remote control. And bring a small flash light.

 

[1sol3ss]

You should turn off LENR - long exposure noise reduction .

 

[BBQue]

You should turn off LENR - long exposure noise reduction .

I am curious: why? I always turned LENR on, specifically for night shots.

 

[CameraCarl]

What lens are you using? You may have some challenges focusing to infinity at night if you are planning to use the kit lens or any of the Sony focus by wire lenses. I am afraid I can't offer a suggestion how to manually focus to infinity and lock the lens at infinity. Perhaps someone has an idea. I'd like to learn how to do this as well. (Right now, I'm using a Rokinon manual focus lens.)

 

[1sol3ss]

If you look online for some tutorial , you may get a better idea why it's better to not use LENR.
There are other techniques that are more effective in reducing noise for long exposures like blending blank exposures or staking , but it's too much stuff to talk in here.

 

[Bradrobb]

The A6000 can be focused to infinity when in manual mode. Infinity is at the far right of the scale. I am not sure if it works with non Sony lenses.

This is a crappy video but shows it on the screen.

To get the shutter time you need to look up the 600 rule and follow the instructions.

Brad

 

[BBQue]

I am afraid I can't offer a suggestion how to manually focus to infinity and lock the lens at infinity.

Simply put camera to MANUAL FOCUS mode, focus on the brightest star (using focus magnifier) or the moon. Done.

This however does require a bit of practice, hence my suggestion to try it out the night before he heads out for the "serious" meteor shower hunting

 

[JimH123]

What lens are you using? You may have some challenges focusing to infinity at night if you are planning to use the kit lens or any of the Sony focus by wire lenses. I am afraid I can't offer a suggestion how to manually focus to infinity and lock the lens at infinity. Perhaps someone has an idea. I'd like to learn how to do this as well. (Right now, I'm using a Rokinon manual focus lens.)

I have not been impressed using focus by wire for doing stars. It is just too difficult to very slightly rock the focus back and forth to find the absolute best focus point. The easiest is with the older, manual lenses.

Focus is very critical for stars and even off jusy a tiny bit will ruin a picture.

With the A6000/A6300, I find that the LCD displays a lot of electronic noise which I don't see on my A99 or A77ii. But it doesn't show up in the image, its just annoying when focusing.

Focus peaking should be turned off. I start focus on a bright star and as it gets close to focus, dim stars will appear. I finish focusing using the dimmist star I can see while having focus magnifier at max.

Not all lenses are equal when it comes to stars and you will likely need to stop down a bit to not have distortion in the corners.

I don't follow set rules. I use test shots.

Long exposure noise reduction is a matter of choice. If you feel that you can do a better job with noise on a compute, you can go that route, but be aware that noise reduction will deal with stuck pixels, while dealing with it later won't know what is a stuck pixel unless you shoot darks and deal with it with more sophisticated astrophotography SW. Usually, I leave it on.

There's a lot more that could be said, but one finger typing on my cell phone is getting old.