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Venus
This wide-angle shot shows brilliant Venus next to the Pleiades at right. Orion, the Hunter, is at left, and Taurus, the Bull, at right. The Hyades, an open cluster, lies between Orion and the Pleiades. It was shot with a Canon T2i (550D) with an 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 kit zoom lens working at 18mm of focal length at f/5.6 with a single 2 minute exposure at ISO 200 with the camera mounted on an equatorial tracking mount.

Most DSLR cameras come with the default camera settings all set to automatic. These generally don't work well for planetary photography. Change the exposure controls to manual for more control.

If you are going to be shooting single-frame still images, be sure to shoot in Raw mode as this preserves the most data in an image. I usually shoot JPEG and Raw concurrently in the camera so I can take a quick look at the JPEG without having to fully process the Raw image.

These settings are usually set with controls on the top or back of the camera and in the menus.

Not all of these settings will be available for every camera. Some settings may be called something slightly different from camera model to model.


Camera Settings for Single Still Planetary Images





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