Tuesday (30-October-2018) — New Jersey

Autumn Night Sky Over New Jersey.

This was the night with a clear sky for a long time. I set up two cameras to record the nighttime sky  for composite Star Trail images. The first a Nikon D810a camera with 19 mm f/4 PC-E lens looking west. I like this camera for nighttime sky photography because it can be set to take images longer than 30 seconds (up to 900 seconds). The second a Nikon D850 camera with a 8-15 mm fisheye lens looking up from my patio. I forgot to reset the ISO for the Nikon D850 camera from 100 to 800. When I looked at the images, they were all black — but since the raw  for this camera have an amazing dynamic range, I was able to increase the brightness by 4 stops during post-processing and get decent images…

Star trails 20:05-03:20. Composite of images taken with a Nikon D810a camera and 19 mm PC-E lens (ISO 200, 19 mm, f/5.6, 120 sec) (David J Mathre)
Star (and jet) trails 20:05-03:20. Composite of images taken with a Nikon D810a camera and 19 mm PC-E lens (ISO 200, 19 mm, f/5.6, 120 sec) (David J Mathre)


Star Trails 19:56-01:59. Composite of images taken with a Nikon D850 camera and 8-15 mm fisheye (ISO 100, 15 mm, f/5.6, 30 sec) (David J Mathre)
Star Trails 19:56-01:59. Composite of images taken with a Nikon D850 camera and 8-15 mm fisheye (ISO 100, 15 mm, f/5.6, 30 sec) (David J Mathre)


Individual images from the slideshow can be viewed here.