These are great tips that Glenn shared. I would also add that it's important to bring a sturdy tripod that won't easily move in the wind which will cause the photo to get blurry. Many tripods have a hook in the middle to add weight to make the tripod more stable. In general, it is best to set the camera to Manual Mode and shoot in the RAW image format. This will allow your camera to capture all of the available image data and allow for a lot more flexibility when editing. Next I would use either a remote shutter or set a shutter delay in camera. This will minimize any movement in the camera caused by physically pushing the shutter button. I also recommend setting the focus to Manual and enabling Focus Peaking and Focus Magnifier in your Sony camera settings. Under ‘Peaking Setting’, be sure to set your peaking level to High and peaking color to red. Focus Peaking and Focus Magnifier will allow you to manually focus your lens on the brightest star. You will want to adjust your focus ring until you see a ring of red around that star which will indicate that it is in focus. As Glenn mentioned, there is “the 500 rule” which is a calculation that is used to give you a useful exposure length to avoid star trails. The formula is: 500 / Crop-Factor x Focal Length = Ideal Shutter Speed. For example, if you are shooting on a crop sensor camera like the Sony a6500 and had a 16 mm lens, your calculation would be 500/ (1.5*16) = 21. This means that you can set your exposure length up to around 20 seconds before you will start to see star trails or blurring in the sky. If you are using a full frame lens like a Sony A7r IV, you would simply do 500/16mm = 31 or 30 second max exposure. You will also want to set your aperture as wide as possible and I would recommend setting it to an f-number of f/4 or lower. I shoot on the Sony 16-35 mm G Master lens so I would set my lens aperture to f/2.8. Next, you will want to set your camera’s ISO which is your camera’s sensitivity to light. Setting the ISO too high will result in a lot of noise in the image so you will want to first prioritize your exposure time and aperture. ISO 1600 is often the sweet spot for cameras and you may have to adjust this higher or lower depending on the camera, lens, and amount of light in the scene.
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