Nikon d3000 night sky photography

I have a Nikon d3000 with 18-55mm lens, I can't quite get a good picture of the skysky. I have taken some but the stars aren't very bright and hardly visable, I set exposure to +5 points and not sure what else to do. I'm using manual mode also

Use a tripod. Change the exposure time to 15 seconds.

Reset the EV to -0-. +5 will do nothing if you are not using a lightmeter and when shooting the night sky, the meter will just not work.

Start with your camera on a tripod with the lens manually focused at infinity. Set that lens aperture at f/5.6 as a start and use a 30 second exposure. The ISO may have to be set to 800.

Once you have taken some test shots at those settings, make any adjustments you need to shoot the rest of your images

Here is a link to some night sky shots I took during one of a recent meteor shower. As you will see, I caught only one meteor of the over 60 exposures I took that night. I later stacked all those images to create something out of "not much".

Ev compensation has no effect in manual mode.

If you are shooting in manual, try these;

- ISO high try 800 or more ( this is where you will need to experiment)
- aperture wide open (at 18mm on your lens, this will be f5.6
- shutter speed about 25secs (no longer than this or you'll start to get star trails as the movement of the earth causes streaking)

Camera on a tripod of course and to prevent any camera shake when pressing the shutter button, use the self timer.