Best lens and settings to shoot stars and nebulas

[blade_922]

Hi peeps,

It's a clear night in glasgow tonight and I want to go out and try get a shot of some nebulas. I'm a beginner so bare with me.
I have a canon 550d and the following lenses so which would be best to get a shot of nebulas?
Kit lens canon 18-55mm
Canon 50mm 1.8
Canon 55-250mm
Sigma 150-500mm

And what settings and exposure length would you recommend?
Any tips would be greatly appreciated and if anyone has taken shots of nebulas with these lens or similar feel free to share some pics so I know what to expect.

 

[StewartR]

I'm not an expert here, but I'm interested, so hopefully someone who is an expert will be along shortly.

As I understand things though, nebulae are (a) small - smaller than the moon, say - and (b) faint. So you really need a telescope instead of a camera lens, and you need a tracking mount. I was looking at prices of photo and astro equipment the other day and a £500 telescope would be much better than a £5000 lens.

For star trails you don't need any fancy equipment. Your kit lens would be OK to find out whether you enjoy it. You would need a tripod and a timer though. There's a very good star trails tutorial on the forum here somewhere and the guy who wrote it is very helpful.

 

[Flightphoto]

I'll add my 2 pence' worth of info first, let me warn you that it's a pain in the arse setting up, it takes hours and several days without a tracker mount, I use an 8'' Celestron reflector and that thing is a heavy beast to setup! Now, if you would like nebulas etc your lens will limit you, it just won't pick up enough detail. If you're using your 550D it will give the added benefit of 1.6x cropping to whack that siggy 500 up, as a starting point, you are more than able to capture Jupiter and its moons but I reckon the image size after cropping will be around 10-15 pixels per large object (i.e. Jupiter will be a 15 x 15 pixel object on the screen) That may sound crap but it's not, once you've captured your own astro images it becomes spooky, Mars offers a great amount of detail so you can try that aswell. You're going to need to look into focus stacking as you'll find you will need to take several exposures to make any great detail. The planets can be rather bright and due to the movement you will need a fast-ish shutter speed of around 1-2 seconds (this is my preferred). I'll load up some photos at some point. If you want to look into the serious end of the kit then contact Sara (swag72) and she will give you some pointers for Nebulae to get the whistle going

 

[Flightphoto]

Basically, it can be done, the quality won't be 'amazing' but it will work with several exposures, time, tea & coffee and some warm clothing.

 

[StewartR]

Just found the star trails tutorial ... here.

 

[Nikon Man]

You won't be able to get nebulae images with that kit, nebulae are very faint patches of gas that will require longish (120 seconds?) exposures taken repeatedly and stacked in software.

You will need a fairly light pollution free location, a tracking mount precise location of visually invisible object and possibly several clear nights plus Hydrogen/alpha and Oxygen filters

Saying that I've taken images of Horshead, Californian, Dumbell, and others with a 300mm f4, lens a Fuji S5 camera in a single 300 second exposure piggy backed on a 6" Intes maksutov scope mounted on a Losmandy G11 eq mount, even then it is quite difficult.

After aquiring images you will need to process them in specialty software and possibly Photoshop as well.

Lol not trying to put you off but you can take some fine milkyway widefield shots with 18-55mm lens, just find a dark site and go do it over and over till you get the hang of it.

18mm, iso 800 F5.6, 20 second exposure (longer may result in star trailing) as many images as you can then stack them in stacking software and keep fingers crossed.

Someone may come along and say they have taken nebula images with similar kit, just sharing my experiences, astrophotography is very frustrating being located in the UK...Namibian desert next best option.

Good luck and give it ago, when you get a good result a big grin will creep across your face.

Ps. Orion is now up in the night sky and is your best chance to get an image of the Orion nebula as it's visible naked eye object on a clear night, 50mm lens wide open should manage that.