How Long Can You Expose A Night Sky Before Getting Star Trails?
Jun 18, 2013
Udi Tirosh
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
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When taking photographs of the night skies there is a simple way to avoid smearing the stars and getting them sharp. (As opposed to star trails which are awesome, but different).
It’s called the rule of 600, which is astrophotography’s equivalent to the 1/focal length of shooting hand held. Basically the rule says that you cannot shoot with a shutter speed of over 600/<focal length> in seconds. So when using a 600mm lens for example, you can only keep the shutter for 1 second before star trails start showing up. (300mm lens can do 2 seconds, 10mm lens can do 60 seconds and so on).
This was once a very simple rule with 35mm cameras. It got complicated when different sensor crop factors were introduced. Actually, there is quite a bit of trigo-math involved concerning the angle of view. (you can check out Wikipedia if you want the hard math).
Kamil Tamiola made things simple by providing a tool that takes in the camera model and focal length, and provides the number of seconds you can leave the shutter open to eliminate star trails. It is simply called… Well Kamil did not name it, so I am gonna call it The Awesome Calculator To Eliminate Star Trails When Shooting The Night Skies.
Here is How Kamil Describes the issue:
Earth, just like any other celestial body, is a subject to constant motion with respect to other celestial bodies. If you expose your photograph long enough you shall start observing the aforementioned motion in a form of star-trail effect.
An obvious question arrises, how long can one expose a photograph in order to acquire maximum amount of light, yet with no visible star-trail effect?
If you want to experiment with night skies photography, this is a great little resource to remember.
[The Awesome Calculator To Eliminate Star Trails When Shooting The Night Skies | Kamil Tamiola]
Udi Tirosh
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
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13 responses to “How Long Can You Expose A Night Sky Before Getting Star Trails?”
Just to let people know, we are updating the database of cameras, so the list should be more complete!
Canon 550D
Please use the option for Canon T1i/550D/XXX
That is such a great tool, especially if you have a lot of different camera systems!
Thanks Manuela!
It depends by focal lenght but also by declination (the latitude of the star in the sky), so you can have longer exposures with starfields near the polar star. A more accurate rule is Max time = 550/ (F Cos Declination)
Ah yes, that makes it more simple…thank you…/s
@f9272132e8a565307095f999cee95ce1:disqus, you couldn’t be more precise! Please bare in mind, I am providing a rough estimate and the exposure time that is produced should be used as a guideline rather than exact cutoff value. I am intending to include far more complicated functionality + geolocation based computation in the iOS app!
wow, this is amazing!
Thanks so much for this.
10mm lens can do 60 seconds, not 30 , right?
yup!
Shooting in the backyard last night at the Orion Nebula. Sony A7RIII with 100-400mm f/5.6 lens. Focused using Live View on the back of the camera. Zoomed in on a star then used my Hoodman for focus. Looked at the shot and I have slight star trailing or egg shaped stars. Shots were at 1sec f/5.6 ISO3200. Two nights earlier my stars were round performing the same shots.
I was shooting at 400mm.