# How to take star photos/making a time lapse with a Nikon D40X



## camphor53 (Apr 9, 2011)

I'm not a photographer, but I've always thought astrophotography was cool. High quality photos showing an awesome amount of stars are great. Time lapses too. I've borrowed a Nikon D40X and have decided to try it out for myself. The lens is 18-55mm and the possible ISO settings are 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 and H1/3200. The exposure time can go from 1/4000th of a second to 30 seconds, then goes to BULB.

Basically I just set the camera up on a tripod and started taking photos with the remote. I didn't really know what settings I was messing with, except it was on "Auto (no flash)" which got rid of the "subject is too dark" message, and the photos seemed best when the ISO was on 800. When I hit the remote it took 25 seconds to shoot. Does this mean that it took 25 seconds to collect enough light? After it shot I waited ten seconds and pressed it again. I did this for 43 photos.

Here's the first photo I took of the 43. It's converted to JPG from NEF (Nikon's RAW format). The resolution is 3900 x 2613. (Crux is visible over to the right)
http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/8385/dsc00871ox.jpg

Are the stars so blurry in this photo because it was very windy? I know that we see stars as "twinkling" because the powerful winds in the atmosphere shakes their light around.

Then I put each photo in a small timelapse video. There's 100 milliseconds between each frame.





The location I took these in is a city so there's lots of light pollution, but I'm going up to a very dark rural place soon and that's why I really want to learn how to do this properly.

Using the camera today I now know how to set it to Manual, and set the aperture and exposure length. I want to take more photos tonight though, so are there any specific camera settings I should be using? Does anyone have any tips for a beginner? I get that less light means more exposure but there's still more to it.

By the way, with  time lapses, when people get shooting stars in their time lapses, how quickly are they taking their photos?
Like in this one: 




Plus what program is generally used to put all the photos together? I use AVS Video Editor but each photo is set to display for 5 seconds by default. I had to go through and change the duration to 100 milliseconds on each 43 photos. It took a long time.

Thanks.


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