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Deep Sky with your DSLR

By: The Editors of Sky & Telescope | August 3, 2015

Getting started in DSLR astrophotography has never been easier.

By Michael A. Covington in the Sky & Telescope June 2012 issue.

There's no question that digital single-lens reflex cameras (DSLRs) are the most versatile
cameras available today. No other device can go from shooting your children’s birthday party
in the backyard to recording distant galaxies through a telescope without needing any
modifications. DSLRs have truly thrust open the door of astrophotography to anyone with an
interest in shooting the night sky.

Astrophotography with digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras spans all facets of amateur
astrophotography. Today’s camera models have much lower noise than in the past and more
features useful to amateurs. In the accompanying text, Michael A. Covington explains how
you can use your DSLR for astrophotography and capture spectacular images like the one
above of the Pipe Nebula in Sagittarius.
Michael A. Covington
 Several factors make DSLRs good for astronomy. Most of the cameras are designed to use
the same lenses as their 35-mm film precursors, and they have relatively large sensors
compared to their point-and-shoot counterparts. The common APS-C size CMOS sensors in
many consumer DSLRs are about 65% as big as 35-mm film, and about as large as many
mid-range astronomical CCD cameras.

Unlike film, the CMOS sensor in a DSLR has no reciprocity failure; it never forgets a photon.
(Well, hardly ever.) A 2-minute exposure is long enough to capture a respectable image of
the Orion Nebula. In 10 minutes with a modest telephoto lens, you can record 16th-
magnitude stars. And DSLRs don’t require you to bring along a computer when you’re
shooting the night sky.

There are many DSLR cameras available for purchase, but Canon manufactures the most
popular ones for astrophotography. It is the only DSLR maker that has actively cultivated the
astronomy market, at one time even marketing a DSLR specifically for astrophotographers
(the 20Da). This model has long since been discontinued, but Canon has incorporated many
of its best features useful for astrophotography into current models.

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Other DSLRs from Nikon and Pentax are similar, differing mainly in the way functions are
accessed and image files are formatted. Virtually all current DSLRs block the astronomically
important far-red end of the visible spectrum where hydrogen gas fluoresces. To increase
their camera’s red sensitivity, many astrophotographers have had their cameras modified.
They remove the camera’s infrared-blocking filter and replace it with a filter that transmits
more of the red light from hydrogen emission. Those daring individuals willing to tinker with
their cameras can purchase a modified infrared-blocking filter and do the work themselves, or
you can send your camera to Hap Griffin (www.hapg.org) or Hutech (www.hutech.com) to
have the filter replaced for you. Once the camera is modified, you’ll have to set a custom
color balance to shoot pleasing daytime images.
Most DSLR cameras have filters that block the far-red end of the spectrum to produce
natural-color daylight images. Left: Unfortunately, these stock filters block much of the
reddish nebulosity in the Milky Way, as seen in this image of Orion’s Belt. Right: When the
stock filter is replaced with a custom filter, the resulting image of Orion’s Belt reveals much
more nebulosity.
Alan Dyer (2)

If you’re shopping for a new DSLR with astrophotography in mind, one particular feature
worth seeking out is known as “Live View.” This feature allows you to turn on the sensor and
view a live video on the camera’s rear LCD screen. This makes focusing your lens or
telescope a breeze compared to other methods. If you don’t have Live View, you’ll need
some form of focusing aid, or you can confirm focus by taking short 5-second exposures
and immediately viewing them on the rear screen.

DSLR Astrophotography: Shooting Stars

Once you’ve picked your camera, there are a few additional accessories you’ll need to start
shooting the night sky. The first is a device that will let you shoot long exposures without
touching the camera. You can make single exposures up to 30 seconds by pressing the shutter
release on the camera, and setting a delay so the vibration from pressing the button will have
died away before the shutter opens. For longer exposures, you can use a special cable release
with a built-in intervalometer. It allows you to program a series of long exposures and
eliminates the need for a delay between images. Versatile, inexpensive cable release
intervalometers are made by Phottix (www.phottix.com) and other accessory makers, and are
easy to find on Amazon.com or ebay.com. Make sure you select the proper model for your
particular camera.

You’ll also want a tripod for your first foray into DSLR astrophotography. Even if your
primary goal is to shoot close ups of deep-sky objects through your telescope, shooting
simple camera-on-tripod shots will help familiarize you with the functions of your camera
that you’ll use for all types of deep-sky DSLR astrophotography. The tripod also comes in
handy for shooting conjunctions, wide-field photos of the Milky Way, and meteor showers —
popular targets for all astrophotographers.

Because DSLRs look and feel a lot like 35-mm film cameras, the way you attach one to your
telescope is similar. To start shooting the sky with a DSLR, you’ll need a few accessories,
such as an intervalometer (far left) that can automatically shoot multiple long exposures, and
a T-ring adapter (bottom right center) for your particular model.
S&T / Sean Walker

Under a starry, moonless sky, put your camera on your tripod. Use a wide-angle lens at its
widest f/stop (lowest f/number) and focus manually on a bright star using live focus, if the
feature is available with your camera. Zoom in on the live-focus view to help achieve the
sharpest focus. Set the ISO speed to 1600 and expose for 30 seconds. You’ll get a picture that
shows plenty of stars and possibly some of the brighter deep-sky objects.

A few nights of practice will familiarize you with your camera’s features that are beneficial
for DSLR astrophotography, such as mirror lock-up, noise reduction, and programming
sequences of exposures on your intervalometer.

If you long for deeper exposures with round stars, you can “piggyback” your camera on top
of your telescope, photographing the sky through your camera lens while using the telescope
to track. With this method, you’ll find that the standard 18-55-mm zoom lens that comes
bundled with many DSLRs isn’t very good for astronomy; it’s slow (usually no faster than
f/4.5) and less sharp than many fixed-focal-length lenses. Also, being a zoom, it may shift
focal length or focus as the telescope tilts to track the sky.

Fixed-focal-length lenses are better suited for astrophotography. You can of course buy
superb telephoto lenses from Canon, Sigma, and other makers. Here’s a useful tip: adapters
are available to convert old manual-focus Olympus, Nikon, Pentax, Contax/Yashica, and
screwmount lenses to work on your Canon EOS or Nikon DSLRs. Because autofocus doesn’t
work for deep-sky astrophotography, you can use old manual-focus lenses that are much less
expensive than the newest lenses on the market. These adapters are available from Fotodiox
(www.fotodiox.com).
If you want to try your hand at shooting objects through your telescope, you’ll need an
adapter. This usually consists of a T-ring and an adapter that couples your camera to your
telescope in place of an eyepiece. With this setup, you can immediately take photographs of
the Moon using your telescope as a camera lens. To take pictures of deep-sky objects, you
can experiment and make exposures of 5 seconds or more to test how long your telescope
mount will track before stars appear as streaks. Even most high-end telescope mounts require
an autoguider or other special measures to compensate for errors in the mount’s gears, wind
buffeting, or other variations in tracking.

Image Processing

At high ISO settings, DSLRs are far more sensitive than the best films of the past. This 5-
second exposure with a Canon 40D at ISO 1600 and a 50-mm f/2.8 lens captures 6th
magnitude stars and the bright globular cluster Omega Centuri at lower right.
Michael A. Covington

No matter what kind of astrophotography you’re doing, the image that comes out of the
camera isn’t usually the finished product. A short, fixed-tripod exposure often appears too
dark, while a 2- or 3-minute guided exposure is likely to look too bright because of light
pollution. That’s normal. Any automatic white balance in your camera is not usually
applicable to deep-sky astrophotos because the subject is too faint for the camera’s computer
to make an accurate judgment. You can adjust all of these settings with image-processing
software. Although some programs that come with digital cameras offer rudimentary
adjustment abilities, I highly recommend acquiring a software program specifically geared
toward DSLR astrophotography. These programs are necessary to get the most out of your
images.

Some popular programs available for DSLR astrophotography include MaxIm DL

(www.cyanogen.com), ImagesPlus (www.mlunsold.com), Nebulosity (www.starklabs.com),
and DeepSkyStacker (http://deepskystacker.free.fr). Most are available as a trial before
purchase, and DeepSkyStacker is freeware.
Once you’ve chosen your processing software, two steps will immediately make your images
better. The first is dark-frame calibration. When you take an exposure longer than a few
seconds with most DSLRs, you’ll see a random scatter of colored pixels — red, green, and
blue specks — indicating places where the sensor has what are known as “hot pixels.”

Every deep photograph recorded with a DSLR requires some adjustment. The author shot this
picture of Comet Holmes from his urban backyard on November 15, 2007. Note the reddish
background sky (left), which was easily corrected using image-processing software (right).
This piggybacked 3-minute exposure was taken with a Canon 40D at ISO 400 using a 300-
mm f/5 lens.
Michael A. Covington

The best way to get rid of hot pixels is to subtract a dark frame, a picture taken with no light
reaching the sensor, but in all other respects just like the original, with the same exposure
time, ISO setting, and sensor temperature. The dark frame will have the same hot pixels, so
subtracting it from your picture will remove them. Most DSLRs can do this for you
automatically if you turn on your camera’s long-exposure noise-reduction function. Then,
after you take a long exposure, the camera will immediately take another one just like it with
the shutter closed, perform the subtraction automatically, and record the resulting
image. Although this feature is handy and guarantees that the dark frame matches all the
settings of the original exposure, it takes up precious time that you could be using to record
images.

The alternative is to take one or more dark frames manually with the lens cap on and subtract
them later with software. Preferably, take several — at least a half dozen — so that software
can average them to eliminate random noise. One set of dark frames can serve for pictures of
several celestial objects taken on the same evening with the same exposure time and ISO
setting.
Stacking multiple exposures helps to reveal faint nebulosity. Combining eight 4-minute
exposures shows the Messier objects (from top to bottom) M21, M20, and M8 in Sagittarius.
Michael. A Covington

Besides dark-frame calibration, the second technique that will make your images smoother is
to shoot multiple exposures of your target and combine them. This technique, known as
stacking, has many advantages. You can get an hour’s exposure without needing an hour of
perfect guiding. If you have guiding problems, you can take many exposures and simply toss
out the poorly tracked ones. You can also avoid reaching the sky fog limit because no single
exposure is excessively long. Stacking algorithms in image-processing programs
can automatically discard airplane trails, random hot pixels, and other large discrepancies
between the images you are combining. And when you stack multiple exposures, the noise
level in the stacked image is reduced proportional to the square root of the number of
exposures you combine.

There are limits, of course. You can’t stack 3.6 million 1/1000-second exposures and get the
equivalent of an hour-long exposure. The individual exposures have to be long enough for a
useful image. That is typically 5 to 10 minutes, unless tracking limitations compel you to go
shorter.

Stacking and dark-frame subtraction are also best done with raw files, not JPEGs, because
JPEGs have been stretched nonlinearly for display, and data is thrown away in the
compression process that makes JPEG files small compared to raw format. After dark-frame
calibration and stacking, you can then adjust the brightness, contrast, and color balance of
your image and perhaps sharpen it if necessary before saving the final version.
As you improve at recording data, you can learn many additional tricks and techniques to
squeeze even more out of your images. But the tips in this article will put you well on your
way to DSLR astrophotography while avoiding many pitfalls.

Michael Covington is an avid astrophotographer and author

of Digital SLR Astrophotography, which is available at
www.covingtoninnovations.com/dslr.

CATEGORIES
Astrophotography: Tips & Techniques, Resources and Education

TAGS
astrophotography

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2 thoughts on “Deep Sky with your DSLR”

1. Joseph-Shuster August 4, 2015 at 8:42 am

This is an excellent article for engaging new DSLR astrophotographers, but it

deserves a side-bar update to mention the Canon and Nikon astronomy-enhanced
stock DSLRs.

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2. Gil August 5, 2017 at 2:24 am

I have just read the article and found some of it overwhelming. About half of it
became too hard for me to understand. I did however understand the basics,but I
started to lose it when it became technical, eg stacking, processing etc. Thank you for
 the article but it seems a lot too hard for me. I really need to get together face to face
with someone who can teach me the more advanced techniques.
Thank you
Gil Randall.
Australia.
gilbert.randall@ymail.com

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