some advice for a newbie

hi there.
i usually live in a very densly light polluted area, and don't make an effort to get out of it very often (yes...the common reason ...too busy...etc)

but I will be going on vacation to the Perinees (sp?) mountains and I expect to have the cleanest shots (assuming no cloud cover etc) that I will have available to me in a while.

I have the 8-15 FE, and I was hoping to take some shots of the night sky.

I will continue to comb sites for pieces of advice on how to do this
but can someone offer a site, or some advice that in the next 5 days I can learn about to try to capture some decent (though probably not award winning) night sky shots?

hi there

with a wide angle like that you will be able to get some great almost full sky shots. probably all of the milky way
pick your scenes to show trees, hills mountains, lakes .... whatever there is where you are for landscapes.
They always add a lot to a starry sky above.

play with exposure times of 20 - 30 seconds any longer will produce star trails
but you may want to try that as well do several minute exposures

open full aperture f2 / f4 etc experiment with ISO's of 800 - 3200

you need a good sturdy tripod, preferably a cable release

there's a few pointers

cheers
Dave

Exposure bracket- exposure bracketing- don't forget to bracket your exposures .

many thanks guys.

i will take all of that in. I need to plan hardware to bring on the trip.
and then come up with a plan of attack.

anyone else with recommendations?

something I thought about this morning was picking your time to go
over the next 2 weeks the moon is going to be big and bright and will destroy any chance of getting good
star pix

so plan your trip for between the 2 weeks around the next new moon ( ie. week before through to week after)


Dave

You can best deal with noise if you shoot in RAW.