A guy at the star party in Flagstaff said my camera settings were washing out the Milky Way.

I was at the Nightfall Star Party last month, trying to get a shot of the core with my Canon R6. This older guy with a huge Dobsonian telescope walked over and just said, 'You're blowing out the highlights, kid.' He showed me on my own screen how my 30-second exposure at ISO 6400 was turning the dust lanes into a white blob. He had me drop to ISO 1600 and take a 90-second shot instead. The difference in the raw file was insane. Has anyone else had a simple tip completely change their astro processing?

2 comments

2 Comments

oliverw4615d ago

But dropping your ISO that low means you need way longer exposures to get any detail. That just makes star trailing worse unless you have a crazy good tracker. I'd rather clip a few highlights and keep my stars sharp. You can always pull back the whites in post if your shot is clean.

the_viola15d agoTop Commenter

Remember my friend who tried that low ISO trick on the Milky Way? He ended up with these long, trailing star smudges because his tracker wasn't perfect. He spent all night thinking he was getting clean shots, but the whole set was basically soft. He had to go back out the next week and just bump the ISO up a bit, accept some brighter spots, and fix it later. It was a rough lesson.

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