First of all, I'm not a professional photographer and maybe not even a beginner. I love looking at beautiful pictures of scenery and would love to shoot pictures of my own. I'll be going to visit UK this September so I need advise on what sort of equipment and minimum requirement of camera and lens is need to take pictures of night sky like Milky Way and Northern Lights. I don't need the newest or best camera just the minimum requirement and if possible post the price of the equipment. Thanks

Your going to UK for travel purpose ?? cause photographing a miliky way will be difficult since you need a low
light polution to start with,do you have any idea that which part of UK will you be staying ??

Thanks for your reply, I will be visiting the country side, Isle of Skye in Scotland for photography. Do you have any recommendations for camera equipment?

u will definitely need a steady tripod and an optional big aperture lens

As smokey mention,A steady tripod is a must when doing night time photography,
About the camera and lens,A Nikon D3200 with 18-105 will be sufficent enough for a begginer,if your really into
photography (say like,landscape,nighttime and astrophotography),will suggest you to get a UWA with fast aperature,
(it might seems expensive at first,but in the long run,it actually save you money since you don't need to change lens that cover the same focal length ard )

As you mentioned, you are not a professional photographer or not even a beginner. And i assume you wouldn't want to carry a bulky camera with you around when you're travelling. I would suggest you something that is capable to capture milkyway and northern lights.

So here is my suggestion, Sony NEX-5 with 16mm f2.8 pancake lense and optional VCL-ECU1 wide-angle converter (this allow you to capture wider scene). And get a sturdy tripod for NEX, 1 option is fotopro c4i which is perfect in weight and size for travel.

I hope you also have the knolwedge on how to capture them, because they're not easy to capture, you need to do a lot of planning such as the location the you're going (must avoid light pollution area), time (when milkyway start raising up above horizon), and weather (if it is too cloudy/raining). From my milkyway shooting experience, the planning and luck is far more important than your equipment.

On the other hand, if you're more serious about photograpy, you can look into getting a DSLR with a wide angle lense. And i personally using Canon 60D with 10-22mm, this combo is quite cheap in the 2nd hand market.

Hope it helps.

Thank you guys, yea I know it's not easy to capture the night scenery and it might be too cloudy or too bright to take pictures. I will check the prices for each of the cameras suggested. Thank you again guys.

btw, you may need to buy your gear now and have some experience on shooting milky way happy shooting, my friend
share your masterpiece when u back~

Yup my photographer friends are urging me to do so and even offering to come along to help me with it. I will share it in a new post one day maybe Thank you

Usually what kind of setting recommended for milky way? Aperture, SS.

but earth moves and when we do long shutter, the end results turn into this
the stars leave trails. how do i not get that trail in my picture and get it properly exposed as well.

i was try to do this but fail~ =.=

there's some rule to follow to photography the milky wayactually.
you need to get a wide aperature lens (at lease F2.8) and the iso starting from iso 3200 (you can raise it up if you didn't get the milky way)
about the shutter speed theres some maths fomula to calculate it
take an example, if you have a 14mm lens and using a crop sensor so (14x1.5=21mm)
then take the focal lengnt and divide by 500 (500/21=23 sec)
that's how you get the shutter speed ( if i'm not mistaken )

This post has been edited by dianqing99: Jan 19 2014, 12:45 PM

star trail is actually easy to do,just find the polaris (north) or other stars,set it in to bulb mode and look it (assuming you have a remote)
otherwise you can take a bunch of photo and stack them in your pc

Wow, this is a good tip! Can try after this. I thought of using low ISO, that's why keep cannot get it right when I just adjust aperture and SS.

camera pointing north or i have to go north????

north star is a star that most the least when viewed from Earth but i don't think we can see North star from Malaysia at night, if i'm not mistaken

Depends on you actually,if you want the tril look like circle then camera point to th north (easy way)
Otherwise you can frame with other landscape and just get the tril look if you want ( this May required some practice)

One more tip for you
Download planets on your android phone to locate the Milky Way

You can actually,at lease in my area.
The North Star and the Big Dipper should be easily visible after 4am