You don’t need much to take quite decent pictures of the stars. I took the above picture of Orion with my cheap Canon Powershot SX200 IS point and shoot camera. As long as your particular camera has an M (for Manual) setting, you can probably pull it off.
First of all, make sure your camera is positioned firmly, preferably by means of a tripod. Just about every camera out there has a hole on the bottom side where you can screw in a tripod. But the above picture was made with the camera on the back of my bicycle.
Next, set the self-timer to something like 2 to 10 seconds. Why? Because you want to avoid any “shaking” of the image. This is really important, because we’re gonna make a looooooong exposure.
Exposure time can be as long as you want. 15 seconds will be a good starting point. If your camera has a BULB setting, you can try exposing for a minute. It depends on the amount of ambient light (read: light pollution).
Needless to say (but I’m doing so anyway), the flash should be turned off. Although… if there’s an interesting foreground object, like a tree, you might want to experiment by flashing the tree.
Your F-stop can be as small as possible, like F3.4. This will give you the widest aperture and as a corollary, the smallest depth of field in which things will be in focus. However, we want to suck in all the faint lights from the stars, and as far as we’re concerned, the stars are infinitely away from us and depth of field is of little significance. So the smallest F-stop allowed will do fine.
Try to set the focus of the camera to infinity, that’s the 8 symbol on its side: ∞
You can try to set your ISO to 1600, but try to make a few pictures with different ISO values, because the most sensitive ISO’s (like 800 and 1600) may introduce too much noise.
Now make a few different pictures. You may wanna try different zoom settings, exposure times (try 10″ and 15″) and ISO values. It’s pretty difficult to see stars in the viewfinder or on the display in the middle of the night, so some of it may be a wild guess. Take a bunch of pictures. For no obvious reason, some of them will appear less steady than others.
Now transfer your images to your computer. At first they may look extremely dark or underexposed, but you can bring out a lot of detail with the level settings of a program like Adobe Photoshop or even iPhoto which comes pre-installed on your Mac. With the level settings (see above picture), make sure the picture expands the entire range of light. You can drag the arrows in the level settings around to bring out the details. Basically you may want to bring the left of the three arrows to where the histogram appears to start (or a bit before that), and the right arrow to the point where the histogram tapers off to zero… or a bit to the right of that. You can go nuts even more, by sharpening the image, removing noise, etc. Have fun!
