The time a star will excite the same pixel will not change. But this will only increase image noise, with no extra benefits.Īllowing stars to trail a bit more by using longer exposures will not help either. The light you can collect for each pixel depends only on how long the star will stay over the same pixel. If you are not tracking the sky movement with a tracking head, the stars will always move across the sensor. This will ensure you have the maximum flexibility when you need to edit your images. The first thing to do to improve your night star pictures is to shoot in RAW instead of JPEG. These can help you choose the best exposure time for your camera-lens combination. You can also calculate the values online.įor Android, there is also PinPoint Starts available. You can find many star trail calculators online, as well as smartphone apps such as PhotoPills. These are more accurate and rigorous than the 500 rule. If you want better results, you should switch to other rules, such as the NPF rule. With the 600-rule, the number 600 is used instead, resulting in slightly slower shutter speeds, i.e., longer exposure times. This results in even shorter exposure time. In the 400-Rule, the number 500 in the formula above is replaced by 400. There are two common variants of the 500 rule the 400- and 600-Rule. Olympus OM-D EM-10, 150mm, f/4, 3.2 seconds, stack of 50 images.
While the level of details will not be impressive, it will be a very satisfying experience. With this guideline, you can even get decent results when photographing bright deep sky objects such as M42 (The Great Orion Nebula) using a telephoto lens. Star trails from a 3-minute long exposure with 50mm lens on Olympus OM-D 10. This exposure time is much longer than the rule suggests. The image below shows how much stars are trailing when I use a shutter speed of 3 minutes with my 50mm lens on my Olympus. With a full-frame camera with the same lens, the result will be: With a 50mm lens, for example, the guideline will tell me the exposure time for which the stars will not trail. Let’s consider my Olympus OM-D EM-5 Mk II micro four-thirds camera. It is an arbitrary constant chosen so that the guideline will work in most cases.
FL is the focal length expressed in mm and CF is your sensor’s crop factor, i.e., the ratio between the size of a full-frame sensor and yours. The rule reads like this: SS = 500 / (FL * CF)
#STARTRAIL PHOTOGRAPHY RULE HOW TO#
If you are an occasional star shooter, knowing how to use the much simpler 500 rule will let you capture trail free starry skies. While this is not rocket science, the formula that links all those variables together is not the simplest one to remember and to use in the field. To be rigorous, the length (in mm) of a star trail on your image will depend on the field of view, sensor size, image resolution, exposure time and the star angular speed and declination.
In astrophotography, we make a big deal out of freezing the stars.
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