I've been playing around with some night sky photography of late and thought I'd post some of what I think are my better shots.

D200, either an 18-105 at 18mm or a 70-300 at 300.  Wider apertures, and star trail photos are at 30 minutes and stills are at 10-30 seconds.  All shot in RAW and then edited in LightZone.

I'm finding the basics of night sky photography are surprisingly simple, and anyone with a DSLR and one or two lenses can take some pretty good shots.  Great shots (of which none are these) are much harder, and depend as much on the post processing as the actual photography itself.

Note, I have the distinct advantage of living out in the sticks, and while there is still light pollution from neighboring towns (closest 10 miles away and population about 1500) it's much more manageable.

Moon


Back yard


Big Dipper


Front Yard


Front Yard trails


ETA, this is what the unprocessed image looks like.  For this kind of photography, anyway, raw images are a MUST.

Take a look at StarStaX. It's an application specifically designed for shooting star trails. It will allow you to keep your exposure time down so you're not overexposing. Basically instead of a single 30 minute long exposure, you're taking 60, 30 second exposures (think burst with 30 second shutter speed). Stitching them together maintains the overall exposure of the scene so you don't have to do a ton of post-processing on an exposure level basis.

Nice shots!  What area, (n,e,s,w) of Virginia are you in?  If you're in SW, the Mount Rogers area is an excellent place to shoot.  I went up there once, but didn't have my camera on me.

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Louisa County, in my backyard :)

Here's my latest attempt, have I overdone the polarization?  Still figuring out all the things I can do in Lightzone.

Very nice pics indeed.

Question, my daughter is just getting into photography and she has a new bottom of the line nikon DSLR. I am not sure if it has the raw format or not.  We would love to get a shot of the moon like yours, do you have any tips for taking a picture like that?  She is a beginner but I used to take a lot of photos back when cameras used film. I still have my old nikon and lenses, just don't use it anymore.

Thanks

A half decent tripod, remote shutter would be nice (wired are cheap), and long exposure times... And of course getting nature to cooperate. I'd be curious to see the exif for more information though, I've never really attempted anything like that shot, my guess would be something like ISO 400 or less, f/8 and 5-15s exposure. The moon one sure came out nice though.

Read this.  It should get you started

If your DSLR won't do RAW then you might be able to get by without it and get some pretty good pics.  My first moon pic is regular jpg, as shot from the camera.

I'm using a 70-300mm zoom, all the way out to 300.  If you don't at least have a 200m lens then you can pretty much forget any good moon pictures.  I want to get a 400mm lens, but they cost money.

You'll also want to use a tripod.  I use the timer on my camera, so there's no residual camera shake after hitting the shutter.  A cable release is a good alternative (and I use that for the long exposure shots because on bulb it will lock the shutter open until I push the trigger again).

My settings for the moon run between 1/25 and 1/125 sec , ISO 100-200, f8-f11 (my 70-300 lens seems sharpest in that aperture range, YMMV).  Remember that the moon is a BRIGHT object, so just because the sky is dark doesn't mean you won't get a good exposure.  Single point autofocus to get lock, and single point metering (though if you shoot in full manual mode the metering isn't that important).

If your lens has VR, turn it off.  If you use autofocus, get good focus lock and then TURN IT OFF.  The moon moves pretty quick, and if you're out taking a bunch of different exposures soon it will be out of the focus point and your camera will go crazy trying to refocus.

The starfield shots are 30 minute exposures, aperture as wide open as you can get, and focal length as short as you can get it (to get as much of the sky as possible).  I use my 18-55mm on 18 mm, f3.6.  ISO 200-400, and I turn on the "long exposure noise reduction" feature.  Your base level camera may not have that feature.  For long exposures you REALLY need RAW, you get better detail and you can clean up a lot of the noise without too much trouble.

There's a free open source package called Lightzone that's great for processing the images, just google it.  Think Adobe's Lightroom for free.

The biggest thing is to just get out there any play around.  Digital pictures are nearly free, so take more instead of less.

If you're shooting longer than 1/125th second on the moon you're blowing it out!  The moon is bright!  Like taking a picture of a streetlamp.

And this evening's attempt.  Just after sunset but still light out.

f11, 1/100, ISO200, -1 EV (I tried the bracket feature and this came out best).  70-300 on 300.

Took the RAW and toned things down a bit from last night.



ETA, a better shot of the house with star trails, different exposure.  MUCH happier with this shot, the moon had almost set and I told the Mrs. to turn off those damn kitchen lights (their shine through the house blew everything out).

Finally, the EXIF data should be available on my pics, just save it to your hard drive and inspect.

Imgur strips EXIF from uploaded pictures.



 

Tonight's moon.  Just before sunset.  Love the blue sky. (right-click>view for full rez)



And heck, the sky was pretty bitchin' this morning too.

Great shots!  That's the sharpest moon you've gotten yet it looks like.

I was looking at this thread and others and I came to the sudden realization that I hadn't done a single personal piece in all of 2014.  Actually, I don't even think I've picked up my camera for personal reasons, even family photos, all year long. I've forgotten what I got into this business for, that I'd loved the world and wanted to document it and how I saw it.  I'd been so worn down by the business side of things I've grown to hate it, actually.  The world, that is.  And when you hate the world, the camera feels like a f-ing lead weight.  I'd say I'm burned out.  Anyways, here's all I have to contribute to this thread for now, some shots I took probably 6-7yrs ago.  

This is just a shot of Orion with some foreground.  I also used the full moon, still low in the sky, to light the foreground.


Are we allowed to show more than stars in a "night sky photography" thread?  Here's a bit of serendipity I caught when I used to chase lightning before I got old


I'm pretty sure I took this one while camping in the Smokies, but it's been years ago.  I think I was shooting my 5D back then.

That cross shot is awesome.  How many frames did that take?

Thanks.  Just one.  I would go out and follow storms, use a longish shutter speed and about an F8 and just see what happens.  I never stacked them, but sometimes I would take a hundred shots to find one with lightning, or in this case, just a few.  The hard part is positioning yourself in a place where you'll get good shots and an interesting foreground.  Not getting wet or struck by lightning was a huge plus.  This isn't nearly as easy to do in the mountains of Appalachia as it is in the Midwest, where you can see a storm coming from miles away.

Here are a few more.  This one's shooting East from a parking garage.  This is the back end of a storm.


Same storm


One of my favorites because it shows the stars.  I wish I still had the RAW file so I could tone down that brightness a bit.


One of the few in the area I was able to get on a flat-ish plane.  This is about a mile or so from our local airport.

PSA: Whatever you do don't get started in astrophotography!  It is highly addictive, causes loss of sleep and a strange euphoria.
http://www.astrobin.com/152798/
http://www.astrobin.com/152798/

Well ok I was way off on the moon, I did say I've never attempted a shot like that at night, doesn't seem like it would be that bright.

... And I think you have more pictures of lightning than I've even seen in my life. Some good shots though.

Need to work on my lightning shots, now that I know a little bit more about the actual photography part maybe I'll have more success.

My method is just continuous high, keep the shutter down through an event and hope I get something.

Nice shots!  It's really tough to get lightning shots during the day unless you have a slave or something to trip the shutter.  I don't even try.  The concept of shooting lightning is the exact same as shooting with a flash or a strobe in a dark room.  You have to think of God/Mother Nature/Whatever as the one holding the strobe.

In a completely dark room, you can leave the shutter open indefinitely, but the only light that enters the sensor is going to come from that split-second amount of light from the strobe.  Lightning works the same way, except you have to expose for the existing light that's already there and at some point the lightning will light up the scene.  The longer the shutter is open, the better your chances of catching a bolt or two, so it makes sense to shoot when it's darker out so you can expose longer without blowing out the scene and still get lightning.  

If you ever wonder how guys get multiple lightning bolts in one shot, it's not stacking photos on top of each other in Photoshop, it's just having an open shutter for a long time.

Nice pics!

Tag for future viewing and contributing

I did a lot of it in highschool with 25 ASA film and polarizing filters.

Was fun painting with light and doing various things around running streams or rivers at night.

Digital seems to be more work.

Most of what I did in and out of highschool was landscape related.    Your shots make me wish I stuck with it or had the time/devotion to start again.

Definitely great shots that have everything going for them.

Spring is not going to get here soon enough for me....

I like this shot of the moon a lot.

Here's mine (though not with a DSLR) but an iPhone6 through a AstroTech-72ed,  My new DSLR comes this week, absolutely stoked!  Cant wait to try it out.
Untitled by TwistedSix, on Flickr

That's pretty dang good. A little processing would make that leap out at you.

Tonight's effort.  Tomorrow is full moon, 6:09 pm here. After sunset but still a little light, hoping for clear skies.

F-ing badass.  Love the foreground.

Shot of tonight's moon.

Not too bad...