Star Trails

The meteor shower was a bust last week end, but I did try and get some star trails. I used a 28mm lens, 400asa, opened all of the way. The shutter speed was around 20 minutes.I am not sure the sky was dark enough at my house.
Greg

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Originally Posted by Greg McCary

The meteor shower was a bust last week end, but I did try and get some star trails. I used a 28mm lens, 400asa, opened all of the way. The shutter speed was around 20 minutes.I am not sure the sky was dark enough at my house.
Greg

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You got some nice trails there, and you got some decently faint stars (3rd and 4th magnitude I'm guessing).

The green color cast on your house and in the sky is from the lights around your house, and in the neighborhood. Print film will show this in a 30 second exposure. If it's foggy or humid, the effect is exagerated. Slide film doesn't show it nearly as bad.

Next time, take a ride away from the lights and try it. Also, shoot more vertically to avoid picking up stray light.

For the record, I shot 73 frames trying to catch meteors. I saw several, but none crossed my lens.

Thanks for the tips. I will try to out of the city next time. I did turn all of the house lights out. But I think car or two might have passed by I am not sure. Thanks very much for commenting...
Greg

Really not a bad shot anyway! I'll add a couple of things to what Speed said - try Fuji Provia 400F (or the newer version) slide film - amazing stuff. I wouldn't recommend any other slide film for this.

Driving away from city lights is a very good idea, but go in the right direction... If your shot will be with the camera facing north, then make sure that you're not just out of town but many miles from a town to the north. :) This might sound obvious but the first time I tried to do something like that around here I didn't think of it until I got where I was going to shoot. Then it became pretty obvious... :D

question.

my camera is a canon EOS D30.

i set iso to 100, f22, focus to infinity, and opened the shutter for over 2 hours.

THE PICTURE IS SOOOO GRAINY!!!

how can i avoid grain on long exposures?

thanks

You need to shoot star trails at a high ISO 400 or 800, 2 hours is quite a long time. Also open your aperature all of the way up. F/22 is to small. You also want a wide lens 24mm or so. I think my exposure was about 20 minuites. I have never tried it with my digital camera. This was with a film camera. I hope that helps. You can do a google search for more tips.
Greg

A 2 hr digital exposure will have tremendous amounts of grain no matter the ISO.

Long star trails are hard to capture on digital because of this. You might be able to stack some shorter exposure images to create the illusion of a long exposure. The problem with digital is it takes as long to write the image to disk as the exposure was when you have noise reduction turned on so you will have gaps in the star trail. You can try a lot of really short exposures and turn off noise reduction and see if you can record anything useful that way.

I've been meaning to do some more astro stuff but since Christmas I have been too busy. :(

I really really need to retire! :)

Did anyone happen to have a camera in hand when the metor broke through the atmosphere on Sunday? Would have been nice to catch that fireball. A few people caught it on video near me. The news had a decent shot... but if I had a $500 000 video camera I would've had a decent shot too lol.

Nice star trails. I have made a few attempts at long exposure shots but my camera has way too many issues with low light and noise that I haven't bothered with any more attempts.

You did a decent job from whay I can see... way less noise than on my camera.

thanks guys for your help, i will try some more tonite!:D