My first try on long exposure of the night sky

Shot taken in my backyard the other day. At first I shot it at manual setting with a 15 sec exposure with 400iso and I didn't like the result. Then I started tweaking with the bulb setting and lowered the ISO down to 200 and with about 17 second exposure.

Not bad at all for your 1st try's, many of the astro photographers have the wide angle Rokinon lens and have nothing but praise for their good quality. Perhaps you can post that shot and let us see.

Nice shot. I just bought a 17-35 then heard about the sigma 18-35 two days later Keep it up!

HerbReal wrote in post #16208410
Shot taken in my backyard the other day. At first I shot it at manual setting with a 15 sec exposure with 400iso and I didn't like the result. Then I started tweaking with the bulb setting and lowered the ISO down to 200 and with about 17 second exposure.

This was taken with my 7D with my 17-35 2.8L (I know its ancient and it might be for sale) I tried with my rokinon 24mm T1.5 and that was bust (it might be for sale too). C&C is very welcome and I'm all ears! (I am willing to know more tips and tricks from you experts!) Thanks!

Herb
erb.Real@gmail.com

Herb; You are entering into an addictive and very pleasurable area of photography and congratulation to you for your decision.
First thing first, for me not to be in violation of the applied site rules, please turn your Image Editing option to "OK". It is under Control Panel > Edit Profile > Image edit and repost permission. That way others to help you, can officially edit your images for you (A very useful, smart and friendly option uniquely provided in this forum).

Then, don't be shy of ISO. You can always remove the noise from your image to a good degree in post processing but if your sensors don't receive enough photons, you will never have the area of interest registered on your image. There are many ways to do this and you can find a great deal of information in this site. My magic number of AP is ISO of 1600 and will move from that after monitoring each image taken at site after full magnification while reviewing on camera's LCD for possible better option but to be frank, ISO 400 or 200 at cost of any shutter speed, sounds inadequate to me. You surely will have all the bright stars even with ISO 100 that might be a perfect ISO for shooting moon too but dim light of sky needs a lot more than that.

Here is a pass by me on your jpg compressed file.
I boosted the Level on CS and played little with brightness contrast, then removed a bit of noise and sharpened a tad and compressed it further for web to have maximum file size of 100K.

Bottom line if you need to see that tiny light, you need to deal with noise.