David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Last Night I tried to do some night sky photography. I had to give up after less than 3 hours as clouds moved in. With the images I had I did some star trail images, and a short time-lapsed video including the 15 minute star trail images.
Perseid Meteor Shower. I know that I said that I was going to go out to get more images of Clearwing Hummingbird moths, but the sky was finally clear last night and I had an opportunity to view the Perseid Meteor Shower. I set up two cameras on the back deck — a Nikon D4 camera with a 16 mm f/2.8 fisheye and a Nikon D800 camera with a 14-24 mm f/2.8 lens. Each was set to take 30 sec images (ISO 400, f/2.8). With the D800 camera and 14-24 lens I took the time to take a set of images to find out where I got the best focus for stars at infinity. For the 16 mm fisheye lens I just used infinity on the lens. This was a mistake. The images I got with the 14-24 lens where I spent the time to test the focus were a lot better, especially with the 32 MB sensor on the D800 camera.
The first image below is a single exposure with a meteor trail using the D800 & 14-24 mm lens. I really don’t understand the physics of other images on the internet of the Perseid Meteor Shower that show long exposures of the night sky (1-6 hours) that show multiple meteor trails where both the stars and the ground/landscape don’t move.
I have included several ~1 hour star trail images that are composites of the 30 second images (using the Startrails.exe program). The sky in New Jersey is not that dark, and the glow in the bottom of the image is the light from Princeton and Trenton. If you look close, several do show 1 or more meteor trails that were visible in New Jersey.
I used a 16 mm Fisheye lens to take acquire some winter night sky images. The images were combined using the startrails.exe program to get the star trail images. The first image is a composite of 15 60 second images relatively early in the evening. The next three are composites of 16, 35, and 300 second (5 minute) images.
The sky was clear last night so I set up two cameras to record the night sky. The SpaceWeather site reported that the Quadrantids meteor shower should peak in the early morning hours. The Nikon D3x with a 24 mm f/1.4G lens was set up to look north above my roof. I used an external power supply for this camera so I wouldn’t need to change batteries during the night. The second camera was a Nikon D3 with a 14-24 mm f/2.8 lens looking south. For both cameras, I used the MC-35 remote set for 59 second exposures, once a minute (the extra second is needed to transfer the image from the camera to the memory card). It was cold (getting down to 10° F), and I was glad that at least one camera was using an external power supply. I had to change the battery in the D3 every 2 hours, and even then it was so cold that the battery ran out before the time. The following are a meteor trail image and a time-lapsed video of everything from the night.
It is hard to believe that it is December. I have not posted anything since Thanksgiving. A lot of end of year activities at work, still more to clean up in the yard after the early snow storm, and finally getting caught up with the Drobo external data drive recovery and new Drobo backup. I have a few images taken with the new Nikon 1 V1 camera that I need to go back and post, along with some pros and cons about the new camera.
The sky was clear, so I put two cameras out early this morning after the moon went down for night sky images. These images were used to put together the following time-lapse video.
