Photography - astrophotography

I had a shot of photographing the moon with my Nikon SLR attached to a telescope which has a 125mm refractor and a focal length of 750mm. I removed the lens from my camera and put on an adapter in order to fix it to the bottom of the telescope. The camera was set on manual and it was on live view to make it easier to see (although it would have been easier to use the astro camera as it has a flip screen to make it easier to see at any angle).
I focussed on the telescope then zoomed in a bit on my camera, and focussed again with the telescope.
This first photo had a shutter speed of 4000 with a high ISO of 3200 - I was told htis was too high a ISO for the moon although good if taking stars.

 I kept the shutter speed at 4000 but reduced the ISO to 200 which made it too dark.
 I reduced the shutter speed to 400 and kept the ISO at 200 which worked well. I zoomed in on the live view to check the level of detail, I could see the crusty craters on the bottom left edge and the white details in the moon were okay.
 For this one the shutter speed was 640 and the ISO was kept at 200. The advice Peter was giving me was to keep one of the settings stable or I would get confused! This image is slightly darker.
 I next tried lowering the shutter speed to let more light in and kept the ISO at 200 and this one also worked fairly well. The thing about photographing the moon is that you want as much detail as possible and too much light can wash the detail out, although it may make the photo look more moon like.
 The mount of the telescope is computer controlled so Peter sent it to look for the Pleiades. The ISO was put at 3200 which means it is very sensitive to light and the shutter speed was set at 30 seconds. The moon was out which has contributed to it being over bright and there is some drift in the stars.
 The ISO was kept the same however the shutter speed was reduced to 15 seconds which has resulted in a darker sky and more dotty stars.
What I was picking up from my lesson in astrophotography is that you should know what ball park to put the settings at but you then have to play about a bit to get the best result on the night.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - printmaking report

Richard Wentworth - contemporary artist

Chris Rose - visiting artist