Hello!

I've been interested in photography for a while, but never really spent the time to learn the difference between an f-stop and a banana. I suppose what I have learned over time, is what I'm interested in taking pictures of, which is a good start.

I've always enjoyed taking in natural scenes - landscapes. I love being out in nature, away from it all and so naturally I'd take lots of photos of landscapes. Unfortunately, just taking pictures of landscapes is a bit boring. There's no subject and all you have is background. I quickly learned you need something in the shot to draw the eye.

Another passion of mine is astronomy. The magnitude, beauty and unknowns of space and the universe fascinates me, and so I saw an opportunity to combine these two interests in photography.

So, the most obvious thing to try and take pictures of in the night sky (except maybe for the Moon) is the Milky Way (that's our own Galaxy for those who don't know. Now you do!). The other thing people often take photos of are star trails - that is done by doing a very long exposure so the movement of the stars is captured as a line - hence you see their 'trail' across the sky. Star trails don't much interest me though, I'm more for trying to get the Milky Way against some cool scenes.

Having never tried this before, I wanted to just give it a shot with some basic 'default' camera settings which I'd found via Google. My camera is a Canon 70D with a stock 18-135mm lens and tripod. The settings I used were 6400 ISO, 30s exposure and the lowest possible f number (3.5 for my lens). I was in Bali on holiday from Singapore, and gave it a shot. Unfortunately I was there during a full moon, but the photos turned out OK considering. A full Moon is bad because it adds a lot more light, so you want to avoid them if possible, especially when taking photos of places which already have a lot of light pollution.

My first astro-photo at Kuta beach, Bali.

The first photo which you can see above is aimed at Mars and Saturn which were visible. I took a couple of shots with the horizon in view, but missed where the Milky Way was setting against the horizon.

I had checked a star map beforehand (http://www.skymaps.com/skymaps/tesme1408.pdf), and next time will print and bring it along with me. I knew the Milky way went across the zenith (straight up) and so I tried a few shots pointing the camera straight up to capture it.

Pointing the camera straight up, the Milky Way.

As you can see, I managed to capture it, which I was happy with. Considering the full moon, and light pollution around Kuta, I could still capture the Milky Way with a pretty standard camera and lens. 

I was very happy with these as first time shots, and it gives me confidence to try and get some better ones (with better planning) in future.

One thing I haven't mentioned and will do a separate post on, is that these shots required a lot of post processing in Adobe Lightroom to bring out the stars. The shot 'on camera' looks completely over exposed and you can see nothing without processing. I'm also using RAW format so this data doesn't get lost from the camera saving as JPG.

This is what the picture looked like before processing.
The one pointing straight up was pure white with no detail visible.