Ready for some astro action? Get started while there's still a little light left in the sky. Set your camera on a tripod, and compose the shot so that it includes something interesting aside from the stars. You might want to include some buildings, for example, or an unusual arrangement of trees or mountains. Including even a simple group of trees, as in the photo here, is better than just pointing the camera straight up into the empty sky.

Check your camera's settings, too. Since you're going to combine a large number of shots into a single photo, make each shot a brief exposure to minimize digital noise. Set the ISO to 400 or 800, and open the aperture all the way, to f/4 or the smallest f-number your camera supports. Finally, set the shutter speed to 30 seconds.

If you have an intervalometer mode, tell your camera to take one photo every 30 seconds for several hours. (You might need to make that every 31 or 32 seconds, since some cameras "miss" every other shot if the shutter speed is exactly the same as the shooting interval.)

If you don't have an intervalometer, attach a remote shutter release to your camera and be ready to lock it down so that every time one exposure is completed, it will automatically start the next, until you choose to unlock it.