How to capture night sky/milky way with Rebel EOS SL1, 18-55 mm lens

[Surfinwahine64]

Currently on a trip to Zion National Park and want to capture the incredible night sky. I’m a beginner and need to know the settings and what I need to do in order to capture. Only two nights left!

 

[Sittatunga]

Currently on a trip to Zion National Park and want to capture the incredible night sky. I’m a beginner and need to know the settings and what I need to do in order to capture. Only two nights left!

Welcome to the forum. Try ISO 1600, M mode, daylight white balance, 18mm focal length, f/3.5 and 10s to 15s exposure, depending on how round you want the stars to be. Their movement gets visible after about 12s at 18mm focal length. You need a steady tripod and preferably a remote release. Save as RAW because you're going to need to mess about with levels etc. afterwards. I don't know if your camera has the EOS M's very useful delayed action setting that takes up to 10 exposures on the trot but if it does, you could take 10 or 20 or 30 exposures and stack them in a free program called Sequator. That reduces noise and lets you stretch the contrast in your image editor to give you better quality. If you do that, make sure that Long Exposure Noise Reduction is switched off. LENR takes a blank exposure for the same length of time as the original so it can subtract noise, which really slows you down if you're taking lots of exposures.

Force a sensor clean from the menu before you start as that will reduce the number of stuck pixels you see in the image. Manually focus on a bright star or planet using Live View at maximum magnification, and check focus on the dimmer stars that will appear as you come into focus. Good luck.