Help on taking pictures on stars

[Young Shooter]

hello my fellow photographers i havent be currently on this forum b/c i have been at camp for 3 weeks and im going back friday, i got a question, what do i need to do to take a picture of the amazing sky at night, please help me on this

[OttawaGoa]

Don't take my word 100%, but a decent tripod so that you're not moving the camera, A manual shutter lock to lock it for 5min or 5 hours, no distracting light (City lights or car headlights.. etc.), and your apeture around 11 or maybe 15? That's about it I believe.
Hope that's right and helps.
Take care

[another view]

A manual shutter lock

Actually called a cable release. Both this item and a tripod are very important, and a bubble level is a good idea too because it's hard to tell in the dark by looking through the viewfinder. For camera settings, it depends on what you want. If it's star trails, I personally use Fuji Provia 400F slide film at a pretty wide aperture (2.8 or 4 should be good). It's hard to get negative film to print exactly how you want it and I've never had good results this way. That Fuji film is excellent for this though (but hard to find and expensive). Shutter speed as long as you can stand it, assuming that there are no lights anywhere near you. There are a lot of reasons for the shutter speed you pick - it has to do with the focal length of the lens and how long you want the star trails to be. Start with a 50mm lens, and go for a half an hour. Do another for an hour.

If there are lights near you then it gets more complicated...