Night Shots and Focusing
 

So while I'm familiar with doing video shoots at night as there's usually a fair amount of light that can be used to properly focus, I'm a noob at photography at night... particularly long exposure shots of things like the night sky where there's usually too little light to properly set your focus. Supposing I want to take a long exposure of the stars and I'm unable to set my focus, are there any tricks that can be used? I've tried a few different methods and while using autofocus seems to yield the best results, I'm still noticing that the camera will be somewhat out of focus.

Any suggestions or tricks?

Manual focus?

Manual focus your lens to infinity, or use live view.

Let Autofocus do it's "sweep" and let go when it goes to infinity. If you use the sight glass it may not be accurate enough.
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Sorry, I should have said that my current lens has an infinity ring for the focus pull. Maybe I'm just not used to shooting the night sky but I'll post a couple photos when I get home for you guy to judge whether it's just my imagination if they're out of focus or not.
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try getting a super bright flash light or laser pointer and point that off into the distance. that should give you a fairly decent focus point.

Laser pointer! Nice idea
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Using a laser pointer may also be illegal depending on where you're pointing it.

this too:

-WARNING- Using Live View Near LASERS! - Canon Digital Photography Forums

theres a difference between pointing a laser into the sensor and pointing it off into the distance.

This relates to focusing so i didnt want to start a new thread.

The Problem With The Focus-Recompose Method

How do you focus on a subject's eyes? I always used the focus-recompose method, but not at f/1.4 like the article proposed in its example, so not quite as thin but still could be OOF at time i suppose.
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You can always focus by magnifying a portion of your scene via live view. This method is easier if you have a higher resolution back LCD screen and an LCD viewfinder like a Hoodman Hoodloupe or Zacuto Z-Finder...and of course, live view functionality.

The new Hasselblad H4D medium format digital body has accelerometers built into the body and will detect how much you've moved the camera during recomposing and automatically adjust the focus. It's a pretty useful function that I've use quite often when shooting medium format and I hope will work its way into 35mm based DSLR's soon. Hasseldlad's probably patented the technology though. :(

so what's a good way to focus on a subject's eyes? place an AF point on one and crop afterwards if it's not exactly the way one likes the framing? i can start to see where more AF points can come in handy. time to use a DOF calculator to put this into perspective ...

that hasseldlad tech is quite interesting