David's Images of the Day Photoblog
The old deck had not been demolished yet, and I was able to set up a Nikon D3 camera and 16 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens looking north over the house. The first image is a composite of 158 images from the early morning hours. The second image is a composite of 190 images before midnight. Note the pesky alien stepping in to have its selfie taken.
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.
Star Trails taken by three cameras. (1) Looking North: Nikon D3s camera and 24 mm f/1.4 lens (ISO 400, 24 mm, f/4, 30 sec). (2) Looking South: Nikon D3 camera and 24 mm f/3.5 PC-E lens (ISO 400, 24 mm, f/4, 30 sec). (3) Looking South and Up: Nikon D3x camera and 14-24 mm f/2.8 lens (ISO 400, 14 mm, f/4, 30 sec). One hour composite star trail images. Dew settled on the 14-24 mm lens making the center of the image darker and making it look like there are few stars.
Individual images from the slide shows can be viewed here.