Nightscape photography - What am I doing wrong?

[limvo05]

Hello Experts,

My first night in Zion National Park was a disaster. I tried to take photos of the night sky but to no success. Despited the fact that I thought I did everything right to get a decent photo of the stars, the photo came out BLACK!

Below are the settings:

1. Manual settings.

2. Focal length was 24mm

3. Applied the 500 rule, i.e. 500/24 = roughly my shutter speed (21 seconds).

4. ISO 2000

5. Aperture 2.8

6. Manual focused on the distant star.

7. Steady tripod.

There was no wind, or cloud of any kind. Granted there was no milkway to been seen, that said, I was expecting to have at least captured all the stars when looking with my naked eyes.

Please let me know what I am doing wrong? I am heading over to Bryce Canyon tomorrow morningm hopefully, I'll figured out what I am doing wrong by then.

Thank you,

LV

[RobertTheFat]

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@limvo05 wrote:

Believe it or not, i've tried and it still doesnt work.

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Is it possible that you just didn't shrink it enough? 5MB isn't very large when you're using a 50-megapixel camera.

[Waddizzle]

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@limvo05 wrote:

Believe it or not, i've tried and it still doesnt work.

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You cannot post a 5 MB file, because there seems to be some overhead involved.  The effective max size is around 4.5 MB.