Shoot the Stars with Manual Exposure

Big Dipper & Comet NEOWISE
July 19, 2020
Frenchtown, Montana

Digital cameras have made night photography much easier than it was in the film days. But manual exposure is a necessity for star pictures.

To make this image of the NEOWISE comet along with the Big Dipper (part of the constellation Ursa Major), I set my aperture to its widest setting of f/4. I selected a 15 second exposure time to ensure pinpoint stars with my 17mm lens and used ISO 12,800. The resulting photo had a lot of digital noise, which I corrected in the raw image file with photo editing software.

Learn to maximize your digital camera's potential by using manual exposure mode to capture raw files. My new class Advance Your Digital Photography begins September 1, 2026, at the Lifelong Learning Center in Missoula, Montana. Click here for course details and registration info.