About a year ago in this column I wrote how you can take some amazing photos of night sky with a telescope and astronomical cameras.

This is something I’ve really jumped into. It’s so much fun, but it does cost a lot of money.

If you don’t want to part with that kind of coin, you can still shoot the Butler night sky without a telescope and get photos you’d be proud to email your friends and hang on your wall, especially with digital photography and some really cool, and in many cases free, processing software.

I won’t kid you though, you do need a DSLR digital camera and tripod and at minimum that’ll cost you at least five to six hundred dollars. Of course, you can spend a lot more.

What makes that investment easier to jump into is the fact that digital DSLR’s can do a lot more than wide angle celestial photography. They can open you up to the wonderful world of terrestrial photography. It’s so amazing what you can do with instruction and practice. I highly recommend taking a class through a camera store or community education. You’ll love what you learn!

You’ll be amazed what you can capture in the night sky with your DSLR, even on your first night of shooting. You’ll see many more stars and star clusters in your shots than you do with your naked eye and you’ll also see more colors in and among the stars.

The great Orion Nebula in the sword of the constellation Orion the Hunter takes on a fuchsia tinge. You see more stars and colors through your camera because you can accumulate more photons or units of light than you can with eyes. That’s because our eyes and brains are wired in such a way that we can only accumulate and process a limited amount of photons. That’s a good thing though, because if we accumulated light like a camera we could have some big problems.

With your DSLR, you’ll be mainly shooting wide angle shots of the sky capturing multiple constellations. It’s better to concentrate on wide angle photos to begin with and then take on some close ups.

First off, read your entire manual that comes with your camera as painful as that may be. Believe me it will help. Especially concentrate on the section about taking shots in the manual mode. Shooting the stars with the automatic mode and focus just doesn’t work. Trust me on that! Also, make sure you have a sturdy tripod and put that tripod on solid ground.

The best thing to do is experiment. The beauty of digital is that you see your results instantly and the delete button is close at hand (or finger).

If you can shoot the darker skies of the countryside that’s great, but even if in you’re in your backyard in more urban lit areas, give it a go.

Make sure your camera is in manual mode and be sure to turn off the image stabilizer feature if you have one.

Set your camera to take raw images and put your ISO setting from about 400 to 800. Have your lens “un-zoomed” as much you can, certainly less than 50mm.

On my Cannon 40D DSLR, I can set mine down in the range of 18 to 30mm. Set your aperture value as low as you can. Some cameras will let you set it as low as f/2.8 or even lower. The smaller the F-stop number (or f/value), the larger the lens opening.

The best way to get a good focus is to use your live view screen.

First, find the brightest star in the sky. These evenings that would be Sirius in low southwestern sky.

Next, adjust the focus of that bright star by making it as small of a dot as you can. Zooming in on that star will really help you with this. The beauty with that is that once you get that bright star in focus your camera will focus the rest of the night no matter where you shoot in the sky or how much you zoom in or pan out.

For your first attempted shots, take as wide a shot as you can. Set your exposure times for anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds. The longer you expose, the more stars and color you’ll see.

However, if your exposure is much longer than 30 seconds, your stars will appear as little streaks because of Earth’s rotation. Most DSLR’s will let you set your exposure times up to 30 seconds, but if yours doesn’t, set your exposure time to bulb and then the shutter will stay open as you hold the button down.

Another really good idea is to have a remote cable shutter to cut down on vibration when you hit the shutter button. That can also be accomplished without a shutter using the old “hat trick” technique.

Just hold any dark object like a black card or a hat in front of the lens before you open the shutter. Then after a second or two, open the shutter, pull the card away and your camera will suck in those photons vibration free.

You’re still better off with a shutter release though, especially a programmable one that will automatically take multiple exposures.

One secrets of good astrophotography at any level is to take multiple shots of the same target and then “stack” the images together using specialized software. You end up getting a richer image. In most cases, stacking 10 to 15 images will do it.

Deep Sky Stacker is a great piece of free stacking software you download at deepskystacker.free.fr that’ll do a nice job for you. It comes with really good instructions that’ll take you through the whole process.

Once you get your combined image, you take it into Adobe Photoshop or other photo software where you can do things like light or darken the image or sharpen the contrast to give you a picture you can be proud of!

Like any new Endeavour though, be patient and read up as much as you can about it. There are tons of resources and discussion groups available online.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and is author of the book, “Pennsylvania Starwatch,” available at bookstores and at his website www.lynchandthestars.com