Star photography

[KMRennie]

Taken earlier tonight at Walltown on Hadrian's wall. A thin, and invisible at the time with my eyes, veil of cloud was glowing probably from the street lights of Hawick 30 miles away. I don't usually like HDR but was playing with tone mapping and liked the effect. I shot at f2.8 28s 800ISO fuji XE-1 Fuji 14mm lens. When I started lifting the shadows a small amount of detail appeared, so I lifted it a great deal.
I know it is noisy and has no real detail in the foreground but I like the feel of the image. I did try light painting with a small torch later on but I don't think it would work on this image and my tiny led torch would struggle.

How do I get better star images, I see that 28s leaves the stars as short arcs. We have a dark sky area about 40 miles away and when I have the settings correct I may drive up to take images.
Ken

[graeme]

Hi Ken

I don't know anything about star photography so I can't comment on the technical qualities of the photo but it's a powerful & interesting image IMHO.

Graeme

[Torbjörn Tapani]

I quite like the image, noise and all.

You see the 600 rule mentioned sometimes. 600 / focal lenght x crop factor, so for you that would be 600/14x1,5 = 28,6 secs. But maybe you have to modify it to a 500 or 400 rule if you are picky.

To really get pin point stars you need a tracker. For wide field DSLR use something like a Vixen Polarie (simple and effective) or iOptron Skytracker V2 (comes with it's own wedge mount unlike polarie) or a studier AstroTrac. Then you will need one shot of the sky and another with the tracker turned off for the foreground.

This tutorial on LULA is also excellent help: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/night_sky___astrophotography.shtml

[KMRennie]

Torbjorn thank you for the link to the very informative article. I see that I was fairly close to the "best exposure". I will return on the next clear night and take bracketed images including a very long one to properly expose the foreground. However I could not see any foreground on the night, perhaps something more powerful than my tiny torch might be needed.
Ken