Canon 80D - Milky-way and stars Photography at Cherry Springs Park - PA

[dudeinwashingto]

Hello Canoners

Cherry Springs State park has been rated as "gold" by the dark sky association and i plan to visit it this memorial day weekend

I have a canon 80D and EF-S 18-55mm IS STM & EF-S 55-250mm IS STM Lens

Ravelli APGL4 70" Tripod with Adjustable Pistol Grip Head 

Celestron SkyMaster Giant 15x70 Binoculars

and Lots of coffee beans and an excellent percolator 🙂 🙂 

Would love to hear from you all of the optimal settings for photos and videos.

thank you
Paul

[Waddizzle]

What type of shots do you envision capturing?  The devil is in the details.

[TCampbell · Accepted solution]

LOTS of suggestions... 

First... do you own a smartphone and second... do you have an astronomy app for the smartphone?  If 'yes' on the phone but 'no' on the app, then buy a copy of Sky Safari 5 "Plus" (the "Pro" version would be overkill, but the standard edition may not have enough detail).  Hence the "Plus" edition (which is very good).  When it's not on sale it's $15 -- so you may need to make some adjustments to your retirement plan to be able to afford that $15 purchase.  😉

Some of which would do better if you had a tracking head (Sky Watcher's "Star Adventurer" tracking head or iOptron's "SkyTracker Pro" head).

Comet C/2015 V2 (Johnson) will be located in the constellation of Boötes.  Wait for the sky to get nice & dark and let the constellation get high in the sky (say.... around 11pm or later) and you might see it as a foggy spot.  It'll be very close to a star named 'Izar' but the brightest nearby star is Arcturus.  If you trace the arc-shaped handle of the Big Dipper and continue the curve then he handle will point to Arcturus (which makes that star easy to find).  Izar is actually a dimmer star a bit "left" (east) of Arcturus).  The comet will be slightly below and left of that star.  

Magnitude prediction is 6.7.  Outstanding human eyes can see objects as faint as magnitude 6.5 but with binoculars (or a long camera exposure) it would show up.  But these predictions are often unreliable.  As the saying goes "comets are like cats... they both have tails and they do what they want."  (Comet brightness predictions are often wrong.)

You might be able to spot the Hercules Cluster (a globular cluster of about 200,000 stars).  It's in the constellation Hercules (hence the name) and that will be east (left) of the comet.  I've never tried to spot it in 15x power binoculars but my guess is that it would be visible as a tiny fuzzy blob in binoculars.  The Messier object number if "M15" if you search for it in the software.  I'm sure a search for "Hercules Cluster" would also work.

As for the camera....

I don't know the tripod brand (but bring the tripod) but if it's not a rock solid tripod then you may want to use a remote trigger (or your phone app to trigger the camera) ... or just use the 2 seconds or 10 second self-timer so that any vibrations have time to settle down before the camera shutter opens.

To get a Milky Way shot, use your 18-55mm lens.  Set it to 18mm, manual exposure, f/3.5 and expose the shutter for a 20 second exposure.  The Milky Way will be in the south but will be low to the horizon ... but will look best between 2 & 3am.  You can shoot it at midnight or 1am... it will be leaning to the left and not nearly as high.  Crank the ISO up a bit... at f/3.5 you will likely need at least ISO 3200 (maybe even ISO 1600).   Lenses more commonly used for these types of shots are f/2.8 or even f/2.

If you use a tracking head (and it's polar aligned) then you can use much longer exposure durations.  The 20 second time limit is based on the rotation of the Earth.  We spin at a speed of roughly 15 arc-seconds (angular rotation) per second of real time. It turns out there's a simple equation to work out the shutter speed.  

The generous version of the equation says that if you take 600 and divide that by the focal length of your lens (on a full-frame camera so for your APS-C crop frame camera you need to multiple the focal length by the crop factor which is 1.6 for your camera) then it gives you the number of seconds you can expose before stars start to look elongated based on the spin of the Earth.

So 600 / (18mm x 1.6) = 20.8 seconds (you can set the shutter speed to 20.8 but you can set it to 20).

The more conservative version is the same equation but it uses 500 as the base instead of 600 as the base.  So that rule would be 500 / (18mm x 1.6) = 17.4.  You can't actually dial in a shutter speed of 17.4 so you'd have to round down to 15 seconds.

A bit of caution...

Light pollution is your enemy.  Since this is a holiday weekend, there may be lots of other people there and they may have no regard for light pollution.  That could work against you.  Twice per year there is a star party at Cherry Springs.  Assuming the astronomers can take over the place (I've never been there) then it'll probably be very dark (they go out of their way to do everything possible to avoid light pollution -- this includes special precautions with flashlights, car headlights, etc.)

I think this is the last quarter moon (so the moon doesn't rise until a few hours before sunrise).  That's good because the moonlight works against you -- but it wont be up in the early side of the night.

[dudeinwashingto]

Thank you so very much TCampbell

Waddizzle this is my first time doing it…so I will just experiment ..

TCampbell yesterday before posting for suggestions on canon forum I got Sky guide app on my iphone paying $3.00 ..i tested it and found it awesome!

I don’t have a remote for my camera but I have canon’s camera connect – but unfortunately it only works in a wifi network remotely

So I am going to use the 2 sec or 10 sec self timer..

i am going to read what you have written this evening and get back to you

thanks again so much Tcampbell

[TCampbell]

Canon Camera Connect app will let you connect even if you're not near a WiFi network.  

One option:  The camera can create it's own WiFi (which the phone would then join).  

Second option:  If you're phone plan includes a "tethering" feature then you can use the iPhone to share the network to the camera -- in which case the camera joins the phone.  Go into iPhone "Settings" -> "Personal Hotspot" and you can just toggle that on (but I think it will only let you toggle it on if your phone plan includes tethering.)   Once it's enabled, go back to the camera and tell it to look for the phone's WiFi network.

The self-timers are, of course, very easy and no fuss to setup and use.  

You might also want to go browse through the tutorials and articles on PhotographingSpace.com - lots of helpful info there (not just on shooting, but also on how to process the images.)

[dudeinwashingto]

THANK YOU so much Campbell. very helpful

i was looking online and found that i can still shoot good night skies with my macro lens EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM..

i have shot some good macro shots with this lens but did not know that i can use it for astro photography.

thanks again

[TCampbell]

At 100mm you would want the camera to be "tracking" the sky.

Since the Earth spins from "west to east", we have the illusion that we remain still and the sky moves from "east to west".

So the idea behind the tracking head for a tripod is that it's axis of rotation is positioned to be parallel to Earth's axis (in other words you point the thing at the north celestial pole and it has an alignment aid to help you point it in the right spot).  If it isn't pointed at the correct spot, the stars will appear to very slowly drift (and that will give you elongated stars instead of pinpoint stars.)

Here's a shot I took with my tracker head using my 60Da and the Canon EF 135mm f/2L USM lens:

That's a single 8 minute exposure at f/11 and you can see the stars are pretty good pin-point spots (no noticeable drifting).  in reality you wouldn't use f/11 so you'd get this in a much shorter exposure -- but it demonstrates that it is possible.  That was ISO 800.  I have a processed version (stacked using many images) that looks better - this was just a single frame straight out of the camera.

Here's a more-complete image (but I still need to collect more data to get more detail on the core of the Orion Nebula - the great thing about astrophotography is that these objects are mostly not going anywhere anytime soon... so you can always collect more data and process the image to add in more detail.)

I used a Losmandy StarLapse tracking head, but that product isn't made anymore.  The two popular products are the Sky Watcher "Star Adventurer" and the iOptron "Sky Tracker Pro".

[resa70]

realy amazing photos from Milky-way.       

[Removed links per Canon Community Guidelines. Please note, Canon reserves the right to ban users for repeated solicitaiton.]

[dudeinwashingto]

hello tcampbell 

i had a great time at the cherry springs camping.

the first two nights it rained but the third night was brilliant

there were 2 people -  on from NYC and other from Long island and boy they had their trackers and costly equipment.

i took some still photos but there were not tha great (i used a tripod)

Now there was this third guy named JJ. Bowen on instagram...and boy ..check his photos 

we saw the norther lights Saturday night before memorial day!! 

over all it was a wonderful experience and thank you for your suggestions !!

[Sandeepvirk]

T campbell any suggestions for 80d 50mm 1.8