Went out on a rare clear night to a wetlands near me to take some photos of the stars. As it was so dark, and the stars are so small, I had to rely on the focus peaking function of my camera to tell if the stars were in focus or not.
I’ve got home and started to process the photos, and I’ve found out that despite the camera telling me that they were in focus, they clearly weren’t.
Hey ho, what’s a wasted few hours in the freezing cold between friends…
These stars are millions of miles away, to your camera that essentially means infinity distant. Next time, switch to manual, and put focus on as far out as can go, then set exposure to a second or two. Trick there is really to get exposure long enough to get good light from the stars, without being so long that you get streaks from the spinning of the earth. Camera did okay though, you even got a bit of true color of the stars.
On a good number of newer automatic lenses going all the way out will take you past infinite. Best to zoom in on a bright target star, I usually use live view and zoom in on the display as well. Focus on that star and don’t touch the focus the rest of the night.
Don’t physically zoom the lens, that changes the focus
Shit, maybe I need a new camera
Unfortunately, that doesn’t work with this lens. It’s a Sony a6000 16 - 50mm kit lens, and in manual focus mode, roughly a quarter of the focus range is marked as infinity, and going all the way out goes ‘past’ the stars. They start off blurred, come in to focus, then get blurry again. I don’t know what deep space objects Sony expect people to photograph with the kit lens, but apparently they’re really far away 😝