Display the galaxy / One small step for an astro shot

1 Live View focus

Use Live View to focus your shot. Press the + zoom button to zoom in on your image and use the multiselector to move to the nearest, brightest star. Then engage manual focus and adjust the focus ring on the lens until the star is a sharp pin-like dot of light.

3 Aperture & ISO

Keep to your lens’s widest available aperture and dial in the new ISO setting to record a much clearer image than your test shot . Our histogram graph is stacked to the left because our image is predominantly dark sky. This is normal, so don’t expose to the centre of the graph.

2 Use a long exposure

Turn to Manual mode and set your shutter speed to a maximum of 30 secs. Any longer than this and the stars will become elongated lines due to the rotation of the earth. For every stop increase in shutter speed, you’ll need to reduce the ISO from your test shot accordingly.

4 Create a vertorama

To capture more of the starry scene, take a series of shots, tilting the camera vertically between each one to make a vertorama, which you can stitch together in software (see below). In our main image, we tilted the camera in a 180º arc, for land at either end of our shot.