Often cameras have a bracketing feature (my Canon Powershot G5 has it)
where you press the release once and get three pictures with different
exposure.  For some models you can even select the exposure difference.

But you should drop your resistance against manual reading - if only to
avoid "RTFM". ;-)

Kind regards

   robert

I liked that one. :-)

   robert

All right... I'm back. Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate
with me, nor did the moon. I was a bit annoyed, but then thought, "the
stars aren't going anywhere." I had played with the manual setting on
the camera, and set the ISO to the max (400), and then lowered the
aperture, however, my camera only has a max 16" exposure. I got one
decent shot, but when I switch from manual back to other modes, or
turn the camera off, the resolution setting goes back to "HQ" (~2K x
1.7K), so the one good photo I got came out with some of the fainter
stars as single pixels. Curses! Other events, and the rising moon
precluded my trying again. Here, I was setting the camera on a log and
aiming upwards, so I didn't have a choice of sky.

A few days later, a friend of mine went down to Wal-mart and I
requested her to pick up me a tripod (I was staying at their house,
and we are like 18 miles from the nearest real town). She brought it
back as a late b-day present to me. Yay. Now, this was much better. By
this time, however, I had to wait for the moon to set. Monday or
Tuesday night, I think, I went outside around 1AM, and Orion had risen
enough from behind the trees that it looked good to shoot. However,
high clouds were coming in. I took a few shots anyway, just to see how
the brighter starts turned out. They looked good... but most were
obscured by these thin clouds. Curses again! F-stop 2.8, ISO 400, 16"
exposure, the longest my camera has. If I can post something
somewhere, I will... maybe later. What I did find out, except for the
problem described below, is that I should be able to get some nice sky
shots when it turns clear, expecially when it is dark enough that I
can see the Milky Way with the naked eye.

What I did run into, however---- and maybe someone can help me with
this, is a faint reddish area on the images at the upper left hand
corner of the array. Does anyone have an idea what this is? All lights
were shut off, it was pitch black except for starlight and residual
moonlight (turned the LCD off on the screen, etc...). This seems
familiar somehow, but maybe the chip is just bad... hey, just now I
thought of taking a dark image (with the lens cap on) at the same
settings to see if it is there. I will try that later and see.