![]() ![]() On the Menu screen set ‘live view’ to ‘Enable’.On the Menu screen set the LCD brightness to minimum, otherwise the glare of the screen will destroy your night vision.You don’t want the camera switching itself off in the middle of an imaging session. On the Menu screen set ‘auto power off’ to something like 4 minutes.You can with JPEG files, so the ‘RAW + L’ setting will save both a RAW file and a highest quality JPEG file to your memory card. When you get serious about imaging you will want to shoot in RAW all the time for the best quality images, but you can’t open RAW files in all software. On the Menu screen, set quality to ‘RAW + L’.However, if you are trying to image the Milky Way using short exposures you might need to try ISO 1600 or even 3200, but your image may be ‘noisy’. On the 450d ISO 800 is a good starting point. The ISO speed is a measure of the camera sensor’s sensitivity to light – higher ISOs are more sensitive but lead to an image with more noise, which gives a grainy appearance. It’s also worth rehearsing a few times where all the buttons are for settings you will need when you’re out imaging until you can find them by feel - otherwise that red light torch is going to come in handy! So before you go out – It’s worth changing as many camera settings as you can to what you are going to need before you go out imaging so you’re not fiddling with buttons in the dark. If you are going off the beaten track you will need a good white light head torch too. Invaluable for changing camera settings in the dark without ruining your night vision. Canon’s own TC-80N3 timer remote costs about £110, but you can buy a perfectly acceptable Chinese copy on ebay for about £15 – you’re choice! An interval timer (also known as an intervalometer or timer remote) is indispensable if you’re taking a lot of images one after the other, either to stack them to reduce noise (see later), or to create a star trails image (yet another guide!). If you don’t have one you can set the self-timer delay on the camera to 10 seconds so the camera doesn’t move when you press the shutter button. Make sure your battery is fully charged and preferably have a spare! ![]() This is a starting point only, because the extent of trailing also depends on how near your target area is to the celestial equator (the closer it is, the longer the trails) – take a picture, zoom in on the played back image, then reduce the exposure length if trailing of stars is too obvious. A rough rule of thumb is maximum exposure length = 500 divided by the focal length of lens (mm). Using this lens at 18mm you should be able to get about 25 second exposures before trailing becomes noticeable. For wide field images, the standard Canon 18-55mm zoom kit lens is a good lens to start with as it is reasonably sharp and can give good results. With a fairly long telephoto like a 200mm, exposures will be limited to only 2 or 3 seconds before stars trail noticeably. The length of time you can expose for without seeing stars trailing in your image is determined mainly by the focal length of your lens. ![]() We’ll assume that you will just be putting the camera on a photographic tripod and will not be using a drive to track the movement of the stars, so the length of exposure will be limited to the exposure length at which trailing of the star images becomes noticeable. Older cameras like the 350d and 400d didn’t have Live View – you can still use them for astro-imaging, but getting perfect focus with them is more a matter of trial and error. ![]() The 450d was the first in Canon’s consumer DSLR range to get Live View, which is a great aid to manual focusing in the dark. The same settings or similar should also work for the 500d, 550d etc. The steps below are written for the Canon EOS 450d but are also relevant for the 1000d and 1100d. This is a basic guide to setting up and using a Canon EOS DSLR to take wide field images of the stars using camera lenses, for example of constellations, the Milky Way or nightscapes (starry skies with a landscape feature in the foreground). Basic wide field imaging with a Canon DSLR ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |