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Sky Photography..... It's Easy To Be An Expert!

Capture the night sky with color slides or prints you've taken from your own backyard or your favorite country site! Orion is a bright constellation of winter.  The Big Dipper is easy to recognize and in the sky all year for sky photographers in the northern hemisphere. Long exposures (ten minutes to an hour or more) will show star trails as Earth turns under our sky.

Materials

• 35 mm camera with a manual option for the shutter
• 50 mm lens
• a cable release
• tripod
• 400 ISO slide (or print) film

Settings

• "B" or "T" to operate shutter manually
• F1.7 or F2.8 or the fastest F stop
• focus = infinity

Procedure

• First, take a daylight or bright indoor photo. If a bright photo is first on a roll, the processor has a reference to frame the film of the dark night sky slides.
• Use your tripod adjustments to frame your slide to include all the bright stars of the chosen constellation. Try including trees or other landscape to make the picture interesting.
• Use the cable release to keep the shutter open about 20 seconds.

Night Sky Storms

• Be concerned about safety.  The best clouds or storms with lightning to photograph are at a distance so you do not hear thunder!  At such a distance, if the storm is a distant supercell system, you may be able to capture stars and/or planets, such as Jupiter above the storm cloud.  You will be recording layers of atmosphere:  the troposphere (where the weather is) and the stratosphere (above the storm tops).  
• Use your tripod adjustments to frame your slide to include the storm cloud and any bright stars above the storm. Include trees or other landscape to give the storm perspective.
• Use the cable release to keep the shutter open about 20 seconds or until there is bright lightning to illuminate the cloud.  Use the same camera settings as listed above for stars.

01/17/2000

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