General / Off-Topic Crab shot - taking night sky pictures

[Pazmino]

I put my EOS 500 on the balcony and gave it a try without further thinking.
I'm really surprised about the different colors of the stars. It's not that obvious when watching the star by eye.

Orion
1st

2nd

3rd

Pleiades

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30/1s ƒ/5.6 ISO400 18-33mm
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[57]

Nice, you need to rule out the red and blue tiny ones though, there hot pixels on your sensor that show up on night shots/long exposures. Star shots and star trails are something iv always wanted to try but there is too much light pollution where I live + I need a new camera first.

 

[Pazmino]

thx. yeah, thought so, they aren't blurry.
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I think the exposure time was to long and the stars start smearing out. Will try 20s next time.
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I Gimp'd the first image (curves (s-shaped) and sharpen)

 

[57]

For still pics I think 15-25 seconds is what you normally aim for, anything above 25 seconds will start to show star trails. Open lens as wide as possible to let in the light, i'm guessing that lens is f3.5? You may need to up the iso though for that shutter speed but downside to that is more noise/pixels. Not used my camera or software in a long time but I think that the free Canon DPP software auto removes hot pixels, might have been Lightroom though but Id imagine DPP would do it also.

 

[Pazmino]

Thank you - great input. That is what I thought too after taking a closer look seeing the star trails.
I used ISO 400, 800 and 1600, couldn't recall how to get the 3200 ISO going, its buried in the settings. Yes the noise will go up. I have the raw images, and will run it to the Canon software. The sharpen filter removed them as well.
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Lens is the Canon 18-55mm IS II f3.5. Got the Rebel I + lens kit, nothing super fancy. The image stabilizer seems to make quiet a difference for doing this.
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As said, this was a done without any preparation, just a quick and dirty thing. Sky wasn't as clear as I hoped for, guess the sea mist didn't help Will try again with some preparations.