David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Views of the sun, moon, and stars
I decided to do some star & jet trails with a different lens (14-24 mm f/2.8). Unfortunately, I did it in vertical/portrait mode and too much of the top and bottom were cut off by the ceiling and ground so I had to crop the image. Nine years later and still learning best method to do star trails. Also, no meteor trails during this sequence. Clouds moved in as it got toward morning.
Night and early morning star and jet trails. Also, two very faint meteor trails. Composite of 193 images taken with a Nikon D810A camera and 24 mm f/3.5 PC-E camera (ISO 200, 24 mm, f/5.6, 120 sec). Raw images processed with Lightroom (to convert the RAW image to TIF) and Photoshop CC.
Learning from mistakes. It took a while to figure out how to make star trail images with a digital camera. My first attempts to do long exposures ran into problems with digital sensor noise, the length of time the shutter could remain open, and camera battery life — especially on cold nights. The camera had an option for “long exposure noise reduction”, however this required taking a second exposure with the shutter closed and then subtracting the sensor closed image from the sensor open image. The result is missing every other exposure needed for a smooth composite star trail image.
Other than the Big Dipper, Orion was probably the second constellation I learned to recognize.
Sunset Panorama View of the Moon, Night Sky and Oakland and San Francisco from the Berkeley Hills. Composite of three images taken with a Nikon D3x camera and 24 mm f/3.5 PC-E lens (ISO 800, 24 mm, f/5, 0.5 sec). Raw images processed with Capture One Pro and the composite created using AutoPano Giga Pro.
First day of a Photography Workshop and Safari with Winston Hall. He told me to always look behind as there may be a better image that I wasn’t thinking about. While we were focusing on the sunset, I turned around and saw the moon rising.
