What am I doing wrong? Please help & advise!!

I'm really looking to get some awesome star shots like you guys get, especially with the ol' MilkyWay showing. I went out the other day, but I had focusing issues. Now, I think my focusing is OK (not perfect), but why does my sky look like crap? How are you guys getting such a nice, blue & black sky? I was using my 15~85, shot @15mm, ISO 800, f/3.5, 20 seconds. Ugh, so much to learn...

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The red or orange glow I believe is light pollution, the last shot looks as if it was taken sometime soon after sunset. According to your profile you're in Pittsburg, which could easily explain the LP. Still, the last shot looks good to me, the others show the constellations well, being in or near such a large city you can expect the sky glow of human activity.

I'm actually about 25 miles from Pittsburgh. I drove to a pretty remote location, and I literally couldn't see my hand in front of my face, nor a horizon line of trees against the sky. I don't know how it could be much darker. I do, however, wonder if it was slightly overcast with some clouds rolling in.

what was your white balance setting? If you want blueish sky color you should set it low kelvin temp somewhere like tungsten(3200k). and I don't know how dark your location is, but not being able to see may not be the best indicator of true dark site. Light pollution seems to work in quite extensive range.
In this case you can refer to "dark sky finder" that you can find by googling. If the location was dark enough, then you can also try to raise your ISO setting to 1600 or 3200. 800 may not be sufficient to catch the milky way. Also, another thing is that, I'm assuming your time and the direction where you are shooting might wrong since I see constellation orion and Cassiopeia in most of you images. Orion rises around 3am ish in northern hemisphere now, which is time that center of milky way is already set. You should try to get there around 10pm ish to get the bulge region of milky way in this season. Also, find constellation Sagittarius and scorpius where the bulge region is located. Orion is a bit off from the milky way. Cassiopeia is located on the milky way stretch but it's almost the opposite site of the bulge region (which still can give you nice milky way picture but it might be helpful to use a bit wider angle in this case.)

I think is the reflection of the city on clouds...

PS: in order to say if a place is dark, you must first get dark adapted (about 40 min without seeing any light source)... hope to be helpful...

thanboora wrote in post #16218552
...Also, another thing is that, I'm assuming your time and the direction where you are shooting might wrong since I see constellation orion and Cassiopeia in most of you images. Orion rises around 3am ish in northern hemisphere now, which is time that center of milky way is already set. You should try to get there around 10pm ish to get the bulge region of milky way in this season. Also, find constellation Sagittarius and scorpius where the bulge region is located.

This is good to know, thank you for guiding me. I use the phone app Google Sky Tracker, which rotates as you rotate, showing you a real time, complete moving sky. I was just shooting blind, really. The first pic was to the South-East with Orion & Jupiter (I believe), the second one was shot straight up, and 3 & 4 were shot to the North West. 5 was shot NNE, and the last was pretty much E/SE.

I'm thinking it's user error more than light noise, I was pretty far away from anything. I'd say I was easily 10 miles from the closest town, which is pretty small, and doesn't even have a shopping center.

Glad it helped! You could also use stellarium and check how night sky looks like at certain time. By doing this, you can see when and where the certain celetial body will be on sky and thus can plan your shooting ahead and also cam help you how you will frame your photography with landscape as well. Stellarium is free software run ob pc and mac. You will figure out a lot of what said is all in this software too!

Plus, April to July ish is the best time fir the brightest milky way above the horizon in N hemisphere. Espcially May, i think is one of the stellar month among those. Rise and set of "center" of milky way differes everyday slightly and its around 12am in midnight that milky way rises above southern-western horizon on May. This doesnt mean you wont get any good picutures in other seasons yet : ) (in winter, due to earth location, center of milky way gets dimmer/fainter) each season has different constellation, different part of milky way shown, and will shiw off beautiful nightscape.

Thanks, thanboora, much appreciated!

I think I'm on to something in post...I can almost get it to how I want...

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Your first shots are not bad at all . In fact they look rather nice . Yes you are picking up some LP but to be expected when in or near a city of lights . Other than that the main thing I see is the sky is cloudy and you have picked up a lot of clouds in your image . That is expected also when the sky is not clear . If you don't have a Clear Sky Chart bookmarked then check out this one for Pittsburg . The time is in military time so midnight will be "0" hours and 12 o'clock noon would be "12" and 11pm will be "23" . So if you going to shoot say at 10:00pm that would be "22" (2200 hrs) in military time . So you would click the little box under the appropriate time and it changes pages to a map showing cloud cover over Pittsburg . If there is cloud cover , no use shooting cause the LP is going to be even worse and the clouds will block your view of the MW anyway . BTW when the map shows look for the large + sign and that should be where Pittsburg is located . Obviously right now it shows all Piitsburg covered in clouds . Sorry .

http://cleardarksky.co​m/c/PittsburghPAkey.ht​ml?1

Glad it helped at least a bit : ) and apologize for so many typos....now I'm reading this again in my PC and it just looks horrible...(typed the posts on my phone originally)

Thanks, Celestron! That is one useful site...bookmarked! Hopefully I'll get out Tuesday night, looks like it will be perfect for shooting.

Ace and Deuce wrote in post #16220705
Thanks, Celestron! That is one useful site...bookmarked! Hopefully I'll get out Tuesday night, looks like it will be perfect for shooting.

One thing I didn't tell you is that weather map is most accurate within just a few hours each way of the present time . That's why it is important to check it within a couple hours your planning to shoot . Weather being mother nature can change a lot over a 10 hr period as we know but this is the most accurate map for cloud cover and seeing I have ever seen . This is used by thousands of astronomers everywhere and yet the person that developed it has made it available for free yet he will take donations .

I definitely took that into consideration, but at least it lets me plan ahead. My son just got a really nice laser that he wants me to shoot, so I'm going to try to get it in with some star shots, should be cool.

This helped me...

http://www.jshine.net/​astronomy/dark_sky/