How do you shoot stars/planets?

MARS will be very visible in the sky here in South Florida (and other parts of the world) and I was wondering if you can share your experience of shooting long exposure.

I have a Canon 40D digital and Canon EOS-3 film cameras.

Nature will unwrap a heavenly present Christmas Eve: A rare celestial event that for once can be easily seen despite the glare of South Florida's unblinking lights.

Except for a fat full moon, Mars will be the biggest and brightest object in the sky Monday night. It won't be so large or luminous again until 2016, and it won't take as high a path across the sky until 2040.

Well right now I dont, but next year Im hoping to get a 2000mm Meade telescope to do it!

do a search on NEBULA a few sky shots there
Rob.

Astro photography is vary specialized and to do anything with wow impact, your going to need a lot of extra equipment. Maybe one of the astro guys can point you in the right direction, but a very big lens or better yet, a telescope is needed. add to that a rock solid tripod and a clock drive. Shooting the moon is one thing, but getting anything other than a smear of Mars is something else.

Check out this page for lots of good info.
http://www.astropix.co​m/HTML/I_ASTROP/TOC_AP​.HTM

This is my favorite astronomy forum:
http://www.cloudynight​s.com/

There is a huge amount of information available there on astrophotography.

Since this is Christmas Eve, there is not much that you can do at this late date unless you already have some equipment. A telescope could be cobbled to a camera -- there are various techniques and a clock drive is essential in my estimation.

I checked their December skies report and the information on Mars is not as dramatic sounding as the report that you had received. It is true that the DCA, which occurred several days ago, won't be equaled again until 2016, but this is not something that would be readily discernible and mainly is something that would be of interest to astronomers.

Best way is with a simple webcam attached to a telescope. I've tried my XTi with a 10" telescope with not a whole lot of success. The key is to take a lot of images then stack them.

Widefield pics of an entire constellation is not too bad, even tripod mounted. Key there is only about 30 second exposures to avoid star trails. If you mount the camera to the top of a telescope that tracks, you can get longer exposures.

Here's a pic of part of Orion:
XTi / 50mm 1.8 @ f/1.8 ISO 100 - Single 8 second exposure on a tripod.