A motorised mount helps, I've seen some great astrophotography just by 'piggy backing' the camera to a telescope to make use of the mount. Anyways, have a look HERE then click on EOS astrophotography on the right, it might give you a few ideas.
The lens you have is perfectly adequate for astrophotography. A wide angle lens will permit exposures up to about 15 seconds without significant 'trailing'. But for longer focal lengths a motor driven tracking mount makes a great improvement in the clarity and brightness of the shot. Be sure to enable the camera's builtin noise reduction for long exposures.
you can do some nice star trails with the 18-55, especially around polaris. Having a remote helps so you can use bulb mode, you can always use an old nokia hands-free kit, but the canon RC-1 is pretty cheap (on ebay) and does the job.
you can make a barn door tracker really easy, this helps track the camera to give you 10 - 20 mins max exposure, all you would need.
focus is the issue you can use dslrfocus this is a fantastic program to help get you sharp focus, and it can control the camera exposure from a laptop. You should get some nice images.
or you can try getting iradium flare images, if you go to heavons-above.com and put in your detail it will tell you when satalites are coming over like iradiums and the iss, just set your camera pointing at where it will be and take a say 20 sec exposure and see what you get :)
You know what I've always wondered about piggy-backing, do you have to compensate the weight of the camera on the telescope? It seems that if you put a few extra pounds on there, it would throw the balance off quite a bit.
Is it possible to take any kind of astrophotography shots that can come out really well, without the use of a telescope??
For example I have rebel xt and a 70-300mm lens, is it even a remote possiblity for me? or do i need a new lens and or telescope?
Perfect timing. I have been playing with astro shots lately and have found a few things I'll share with you:
- I use my Tamron 28-75 mostly, to night landscapes with the stars, trees, etc. It works real well with the F2.8 app. at 28ish mm, the stars don't trail so much
- I have used my 70-300, but shy away from it. It's good for the moon, but stars start to trail in only a second or two at those zoom levels.
- Watch the focus! AF doesn't work too well, I use M, but since it's dark, it can be tricky to get sharp. I carry a MagLight and shine it on trees, etc, if I need to focus on them, get it set, then turn it off again.
- Use either a remote, or the self timer. If you try to press the shutter yourself, you'll wiggle the camera.
I have a few in my portfolio (I think), if you want to take a look. Let us know how you make out, and best of luck to you!
i have a question, if i use my toucam to take load of bmp files of say Jupiter am i able under basic rules to stack them with registax? Registax is a program for astrophotography that aligns each frame and then stacks them up to get a high signal to noise ratio i don't know how it does the stacking but i can do it the same in photoshop using normal mode blending set to 50%.
i have a question, if i use my toucam to take load of bmp files of say Jupiter am i able under basic rules to stack them with registax? Registax is a program for astrophotography that aligns each frame and then stacks them up to get a high signal to noise ratio i don't know how it does the stacking but i can do it the same in photoshop using normal mode blending set to 50%.
No, It has to come from only one image, stacking images is adding layer of other images.
Anything done in-camera is legal, but since stacking images would essentially be multiple exposures, only a few cameras (mostly fujifilms) will be able to do this. Other than that, stacking is not permitted in any form for DPC entries.
