![]() ![]() One overall winner with an extra £25 prizeĮntries to be received by 31st December 2018. One winner for each category, £25 Prize for each These can be anything from wide angle, long exposure to time-lapse images and don’t need complicated equipment just a camera with manual controls and a tripod They will need to be long exposure images taken with a tracking mount that counters the Earth’s rotationģ Nightscapes, wide angle images using just ordinary cameras These would be pictures of individual night sky objects from outside our solar system so galaxies, nebulae, star clusters. The special video cameras we use are actually quite cheap but once again one needs a good telescope.ġ Solar system, including the Moon, Sun and planetsĬlose up images of the solar system will probably need a long telephoto lens or a camera attached to a telescope We then use special software to separate the good video frames from the blurry ones and then stack the good ones to give a sharp final image. We get around this by taking video of a planet, again through a telescope. ![]() Because of the way the air moves in our atmosphere it blurs any high magnification shot of more than a fraction of a second. ![]() There’s no way to do this yourself for less than a few hundred pounds but you can try fitting your camera body to our club scope one evening if you like.Īmazingly, the best moon crater shots and planet images are actually taken from video footage. You need a pretty good telescope for this with a stable mount and a motor drive to counteract the Earth’s rotation. A big zoom camera lens might do it on a tripod again but really good shots need a camera body attached to a telescope. Taking good pictures of the moon needs a really long lens. Point the camera somewhere towards North and after your long wait you’ll see the stars make a swirling circle around the Pole star. (You’ll probably need a remote controller for this) Set up the camera just as before but turn the ISO sensitivity down to 400 or so. Your camera will probably automatically shoot JPEG type files which are fine but if you want to develop the images on your computer to improve them then see if your camera shoots RAW files which allow you to pull out every scrap of detail from the picture.Īnother thing you can do is to deliberately allow the stars to trail in the pictures (due to the Earth’s rotation) by using really long exposures of ten or twenty minutes using the camera’s bulb or “B” mode if it’s got one. You should see plenty of stars and the interesting thing is to include buildings or landscapes as well. Then fix you camera to a tripod and just try pointing it at different parts of the sky to see what you get when you push the button. Finally set your sensor’s sensitivity to a high setting, 1600 or 3200 ISO, so that the camera collects light as fast as it can. Set your camera to manual focus and fix the focus at infinity so that the stars are sharp. Open your lens aperture to its widest setting (the lowest “f” number) so that your lens collects as much light as possible. Then set your exposure time to its longest available time, usually 30 seconds. The only other thing is a tripod so the camera can be kept still for a long exposure. The first thing you need is a digital camera which you can operate manually so as to set exposure time, focus etc. ![]() TIPS FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO TRY ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY Taking great close up shots of lunar craters or the rings of Saturn still needs some specialist equipment like a good telescope with a motor drive but anyone can use a normal digital camera to take great night shots. These days amateur astronomers with affordable equipment are taking pictures of the planets and deep space better than the Hubble space telescope was producing when first launched. Jersey Astronomy Club is launching this competition to raise people’s awareness of astronomy and particularly how easy it is to take photographs of the night’s sky with modern digital cameras. The competition rules are at the end of this piece. ![]()
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