night sky photos using Nikon p500

<p>I'm hoping this is in the right place...lol. I've had my Nikon Coolpix p500 for about 6 months and have taken some great shots. It takes some amazing pictures of the moon, however, photos of stars are a little hard to come by. Can anyone tell me the settings to use? I realize where I live has alot of light so obviously stars are harder to take photos of. Any help would be great....I'm heading out on an Alaska cruise in the summer so I want to have some sort of idea. Thanks!!</p>

<p>M mode, a large aperture, pretty much the largest you got and an exposure time in the seconds. ISO should be fairly low. You obviously need a tripod. Stars are a very challenging subject and certain limitations of your camera will become apparent. If you get a low-contrast picture, often brown, you need to go to an area where there's less light pollution.</p>

<p>Hi Steph, the trick to photographing the night sky is long exposure and software processing. </p>

<p>A good starting point setup is:</p>

<ol>

<li>Camera mounted on a steady tripod</li>

<li>Set ISO from the low side and work your way up experimentally depending on conditions. </li>

<li>Start with an exposure time of 30 seconds.</li>

<li>Turn off VR.</li>

<li>Manual focus to infinity.</li>

<li>Take the shot.</li>

</ol>

<p>The resulting picture will look messy if it's shot in a light-polluted site - typically a pinkish-orange blotch with specs of bright spots, but stars and details can be extracted from the light pollution in post processing. Example of before and after:<br>

<img src="../general-comments/attachment/1764747/_dsc2288_s.jpg" alt="" width="510" height="339" /><br>

<img src="../general-comments/attachment/1764732/_dsc2290_1s.jpg" alt="" width="510" height="339" /></p>

<p>The process can become quite involved and there have been many prior discussions on the subject so do a search from the top-right corner search-box for terms such as "Star Trails", "Long Exposure", "Night Sky". </p>

<p>Your trip to Alaska will likely be under much darker skies and a bit of practice can reward you with great images even with a non-DSLR. </p>

<p>Thanks so much! As soon as I have a clear night I will try it out. Its a little grey right now. :)</p>

<p>I have the similarly specified P100 (same basic camera, different lens) and to be honest it's the last camera I'd choose to do astrophotography with! I strongly advise that you take some practise shots before taking the camera on a long trip, and that you take one or two spare batteries, since these can only be charged in the camera unless you buy a "universal" type Li-Ion charger.</p>

<p>I'll second the advice to keep the ISO low. Nikon have chosen to only allow JPEG shooting with this camera, so it's impossible to avoid in-camera processing of the images. The way that Nikon deals with high-ISO noise is to apply some blurring, so only the lowest 160 ISO setting gives you the sharpest pictures.</p>

<p>Secondly the camera won't autofocus on a dark sky, so you'll have to use the rather poor manual focus mode or you can try the [mountain icon] infinity focus setting. Not sure how accurate the mountain icon infinity focus is though.</p>

<p>You might also have trouble persuading the camera to fire when pointed at a black sky. I recently tried to use my P100 to take pictures of fireworks - a bad move that I won't try again in a hurry. Even with the camera switched to both Manual exposure and Manual Focus, it locked up and wouldn't respond to the shutter button for some seconds at a time. (BTW, the minimum aperture and minimum ISO are both too high to expose fireworks correctly. You'd ideally need to fit an ND filter, but, guess what? The camera has no filter thread!)</p>

<p>Finally, if you need an ML-L3 type remote shutter release to use the camera on a tripod, 3rd party clones of these can be bought very cheaply, and work just as well as Nikon's expensive one.</p>

<p>I'm heading out on an Alaska cruise in the summer so I want to have some sort of idea. Thanks!!<br>

Some good advice above but...Skies may not be very dark during Alaska summer. Sun sets about 11PM & darkness is minimal. Land of Midnight Sun.</p>

<p>I may have figured it out. Check out my photos and see. :) Thanks all! More advice is welcome, however!</p><div></div>

<p>Steph, this isn't what came out of the camera, is it? </p>

<p>If not, the treatment is much too aggressive. The stars appear all to be the same brightness which they are not, and the individual stars are not as defined as they should. </p>

<p>Michael...no its not. The star in the middle is all the camera picked out. I used photoshop to bring out the other ones. I over-did the settings on photoshop just to see what it would do. Its a pretty clear day today, so hopefully tonight I can try again and work on it.</p>

<p>Any luck, Steph? </p>

<p>Nope....its been cloudy as heck. Typical late fall weather here in BC. Lol. :) Good time to take black and white photos.</p>