Which lens to use with mny nikon d3100 for night sky photography? - 1

Hi, i have recently purchased a nikon d3100 with a nikon DX AF-S nikkor 18-55mm VR lens which i'm very happy with. I'm at the stage where i would love to start shooting the sky at night, stars and moon.
my question is would i benefit form purchasing a different lens or a conversion lens and if so which lens would you recommend. Also what would be a good setting to have my camera on with my current lens.

Your current lens should do just fine. What you will need is a tripod. Other than that, focus on infinity and play a bit with different shutter speeds and aperture values.

A remote also would be helpful so that you don't need to touch the camera when you use bulb mode.

As a rule of thumb, the stars will appear as dots instead of lines when you use shutter speed faster than 300 divided by the focal length. So at e.g. 20mm focal length you can use 300/20=15 seconds shutter speed.

(Other sources may say 500 divided by focal length, but that's usually for full frame cameras. Crop frame cameras need to use different values. Technically, with the crop factor included, it would boil down to 333, but it's not that easy to calculate with that… Hence i use 300 myself)