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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 images is to use RAW instead of JPEG. Improving Your Night Sky Photography With the 500 Rule and Image Stacking These can help you choose the best exposure time for your camera-lens combination. Nowadays, you can find many star trail calculators online. 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 an 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, respectively. While the level of details will not be impressive, it will be a very satisfying experience and it would be great to give it a try.
#DARK AND LIGHT TAMING CALCULATOR FULL#
With a full frame camera with the same lens, the exposure time will be:īy using the 500 rule you can even get decent results when photographing bright deep sky objects such M42 (The Great Orion Nebula) using a telephoto lens, particularly if you allow stars to trail a bit more than usual. With a 50mm lens, for example, the 500 rule will tell you the exposure time for which the stars will not trail is: It is an arbitrary constant chosen so that the rule will work decently in most cases. 2.7 or higher for compact cameras with a 1″-type sensor or smallerĪs far as I know, while it can be loosely related to image resolution and field of view at a specified focal length, the use of the number “500” doesn’t have an actual meaning.1.6 (1.5) for Canon (Nikon) APS-C cameras.SS is the shutter speed in seconds, FL 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.Ĭommon crop factors, CF, for different types of camera are: The rule reads like this: SS = 500 / (FL * CF)
#DARK AND LIGHT TAMING CALCULATOR HOW TO#
If you are an occasional star shooter, knowing how to use the much simpler 500 rule will let you capture reasonably 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.
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To be rigorous, the length (in mm) of a star trail on your image will depend on the field of view of your camera-lens combination, the sensor size, the image resolution, the exposure time and the star angular speed and declination. In astrophotography, we make a big deal out of freezing the stars. This rotation creates the rather fast 15º/hour apparent motion of stars. Otherwise, you need to use it so that you can capture clean images of the Milky Way and the starry sky in general.īut why are you getting star trails in the first place? That’s because the Earth is rotating on itself once every day. Of course, if your goal is to do star trails, you should ignore this rule. The idea behind the 500 rule is to provide you with an easy-to-remember formula to freeze the stars movement and to get star trails free images. And for your nighttime photography, the looney-11 rule will help you to properly expose the Moon. These deal with setting a proper exposure in specific daylight conditions. Notable examples of such empirical rules are the sunny-16, overcast-8 and sunset-4 rules. Nonetheless, by learning those rules we can work better and faster even when shooting digitally. We can afford to be a bit sloppy and to adjust settings on the fly. In the digital era, however, we can check the results in real time. You could only see the results once you’ve developed the film. With film, in fact, the pressure was on to get it right in camera as much as possible. These help photographers quickly set up their cameras for the most common situations. The rule is part of a larger family of empirical rules that have been developed, mostly in the days of film photography. When photographing a starry night with a fixed tripod, use the 500 Rule to guesstimate the slowest possible shutter speed to avoid star trails.