First attempt at shooting the Milky Way

[MrPlow]

I have the same lens. It focuses past infinity. Kind of a bummer when I try to do a low-light astral shot.

I've gotten good pictures with old f-mount manual focus film camera lenses, but they have a narrower view of the sky.

Perseid meteor shower's coming up in a couple months!

You can also try transit-finder.com to get some pics of the international space station.

Most lenses have to focus past infinity because infinity focus is highly affected by ambient temperatures. Infinity focus isn't always in the same spot, so it you hit infinity at the very end of the focus stop, the lens will be soft and not focused in some other conditions.

I usually try to use the live view to zoom into a bright star and manual focus on it, which might be hard with such a slow lens. I also try finding a bright light in the distance such as a house or car and focus on that to start out. A light a mile away will be effectively in the same focal plane as the stars given the amount of depth of field from 18mm f3.5.

 

[JustN89]

Good work! I'm surprised you were able to get that much out of the kit lens on an APS-C camera, although the Nikon 5600 has a really good sensor.

Few tips (I'm a semi-pro landscape photographer):

1. Instead of using levels or contrast or curves to adjust the "pop" of the galactic core of the Milky Way, try using a unsharp mask function. I don't know what Gimp has to offer, but if there is an un-sharp mask tool, then use it at a super high radius setting on the sky, then adjust the amount of intensity to your liking. This is the easy-cheat way of getting a nice pop out of the galactic core without completely nuking the rest of the image into clipping to black.
2. For an APS-C sized sensor camera, you ideally need a lens as fast or faster than f2.8 to be able to do much editing on the RAW files. The stacking software helps to mitigate this, but it has limitations.
3. Try 30 second exposures at ISO 800, shooting in RAW. The sensor has plenty of ISO invariance that by ISO 800 you can push the file brightness in post to ISO 1600+ without any additional noise compared to shooting the RAW files at ISO 1600+. What you get back by shooting at ISO 800 is added dynamic range which helps retain the colors in the brighter stars and areas of the galactic core.
4. The major drawback of using the stacking software is that the edges and corners of the final image once stacked together will be very soft and blurry. This is due to many factors, but mainly because since the lens is stationary, it's combining areas of the sky from different parts of the image frame. With wide angle lenses, this blends the distortion and lens artifacts such as coma. That explanation probably doesn't make much sense if you are new to photography, but keep in mind that too many exposures is detrimental when using this technique.
5. 65 shots is way too many for your setup when stacking from a stationary camera. Unless your have the camera tracking the sky movement, try keeping your stack to less than 10. If you use longer exposures like 30 seconds you will get a bit more streaking in the stars, but that's the trade-off when shooting a slow lens on a crop sensor. If I was in your shoes, I would shoot maybe 4 frames at ISO 800 for 20-30 seconds (depends on level of light pollution).
6. If you really get into doing this as a hobby or semi-profession, then it's worth learning how to use Photoshop, which is $10 a month. Despite what many like to shout about on the internet, nothing comes remotely close to Photoshop when doing more advanced photo editing. The stacking software is still nice in addition to Photoshop, but software like Gimp and Affinity are mere clunky skeletons of what Photoshop can do.
7. One major drawback of using the stacking method with multiple exposures is that the ground will be blurry in the final output because the software is aligning the sky, which moves. You will need to learn how to do a separate exposure for the ground and then blend it manually to the final sky output image. You can then use any shutter speed and aperture you need to get the foreground properly exposed and in focus.
8. Also look into doing panorama stitching to widen the angle of view. 18mm is not very wide on crop cameras and shooting 3 or more images in a panorama will not only increase your view angle, but it will also reduce the noise of the final image, because you are in effect gathering more photons and using a larger sensor for the capture. It only takes about 3 shots in a panorama to move an APS-C sensor up to the realm of full frame sensor in terms of noise control, given the exposure and aperture are the same.

Also, try joining a photo forum like Digital Photography Review or Fred Miranda, where you will find countless people willing to help, and especially those who are using the same gear.

Thank you for the advice!

 

[Snagglefoot]

To the OP, that’s a totally awesome shot.

 

[ka9mnx]

I think your first, untouched, photo looks great! Also, I think your exposure time was good (maybe a little longer) but your ISO is way too high. Start by opening the lens wide open and ISO the lowest the camera will natively go. Then adjust your exposure time to what the in-camera meter says is right.

I was a 35mm film camera (hobby) user for 30 years. After 20 years of absence, last year I decided to dabble into it again. I bought the D5600 with the 18-140mm kit lens and the 35mm and 50mm primes. As an old film camera user I could never get used to using menus to manipulate the camera settings. So I went into a search for something else. I bought a used Fujifilm X-T1 because it looked like it would fit the bill and was cheap. The X-T1 is a beautiful camera and just what I was looking for. Recently I traded my D5600 gear to Roberts Camera for a used X-T2 and life is good.

I hope you stay in the hobby and enjoy it. You seem to have the eye!

 

[MrPlow]

I think your first, untouched, photo looks great! Also, I think your exposure time was good (maybe a little longer) but your ISO is way too high. Start by opening the lens wide open and ISO the lowest the camera will natively go. Then adjust your exposure time to what the in-camera meter says is right.

I was a 35mm film camera (hobby) user for 30 years. After 20 years of absence, last year I decided to dabble into it again. I bought the D5600 with the 18-140mm kit lens and the 35mm and 50mm primes. As an old film camera user I could never get used to using menus to manipulate the camera settings. So I went into a search for something else. I bought a used Fujifilm X-T1 because it looked like it would fit the bill and was cheap. The X-T1 is a beautiful camera and just what I was looking for. Recently I traded my D5600 gear to Roberts Camera for a used X-T2 and life is good.

I hope you stay in the hobby and enjoy it. You seem to have the eye!

If he was using a star tracker and could go with longer exposure times, then lowering the ISO as far as possible would work. But, with stationary camera not tracking the sky, ISO 800 is the sweet spot for this sensor as any ISO above that is really just about equal to pushing the exposure of the ISO 800 file in post processing. For sensors that don't perform as well as the D5600, there is nothing wrong with doing ISO 1600 for night sky shots.

The Fuji cameras are great, especially for folks who liked shooting back in the day with film. Lots of neat knobs to turn and fiddle with instead on menus, as you already pointed out. Great choice of camera system. I shoot Canon and Sony. Sony is pretty bad about forcing too much use of their menus and the controls are rather poor. Canon is sort of halfway between Sony and Fuji for ease of external controls.

 

[eljefino]

Most lenses have to focus past infinity because infinity focus is highly affected by ambient temperatures. Infinity focus isn't always in the same spot, so it you hit infinity at the very end of the focus stop, the lens will be soft and not focused in some other conditions.

I've seen this on very long telephoto lenses that are afffected by the expansion and contraction of metal.

That's not what's going on with the mostly plastic wide angle kit lens. It was never intended for manual focus photography and simply doesn't have a calibrated stop.

 

[MrPlow]

I've seen this on very long telephoto lenses that are afffected by the expansion and contraction of metal.

That's not what's going on with the mostly plastic wide angle kit lens. It was never intended for manual focus photography and simply doesn't have a calibrated stop.

I've been doing night sky shots for a very long time using all sorts of camera lenses, some being the top-of-the line lenses costing thousands of dollars. The ambient temp has enough of an effect that all lenses need some room to hit proper infinity focus. I think there are two factors at play, one being the physical changes to the lens structure with expanding and contracting parts, and the other factor being the change in refraction characteristics of different air temps. Sure, there may also be some added room for manufacturing tolerances, but the change in infinity focus still needs to account for. Some lenses stop right on the infinity mark at just the right point where it would work well for most of the conditions one would be shooting in, if not always critically perfectly on the mark. One of my lenses is like this, and I might actually take it apart and modify it so it does go past infinity a little before hitting the hard stop.

There is also the fact that wider lenses often do not have as flat of a focus plane as longer telephoto lenses. There is a lot of field curvature in many wider angle lenses, which means the edges of the frame will never hit the exact infinity focus found in the center. So, even with not factoring in ambient temps or anything else, it would be impossible to get the center or edges in perfect focus with the exact same hard stop limit to the focus mechanism.

And, on top of all that, wider angle lenses have a much lower tolerance to shifts in the focal plane in regards to how far the focus strays away from the sensor plane. If the elements in the lens are expanded away from the sensor plane by even the tiniest amount, it translates to a somewhat profound change in the focus. This is why wide angle lenses need really thin extension tubes to get a closer focusing distance and why telephoto lenses need much longer extension tubes to get a closer focusing distance. Wide angle lenses are much more sensitive to those changes, even when taking into account the deeper depth of field that helps them out a lot.

And, even more on top of all that, yet again. LOL. Is that many zoom lenses are not parfocal, meaning the focus changes based on the zoom focal length setting. This can actually be quite dramatic, so zoom lenses, no matter how well built, if they are not parfocal (which usually only the cinema lenses costing in the $20K + range are capable of) they need a pretty wide range before the focus hard stop in order to reach infinity at all focal lengths.

Oh, and even more, if someone is shooting non-visible light spectrums, those wave-lengths of light might require much different focus settings to reach the same focus distances as normal visible light.