The Thursday night / Friday morning skies did indeed stay clear, so a session watching the Geminids was on. The car was de-iced, packed and soon I was at the chosen venue. The temperature had dropped to -2 by then, so I donned a fair amount of insulation. There's something weird about dressing like the Michelin Man, complete with buff and balaclava, then walking through a very posh neighbourhood at 11:30 p.m. while carrying a small pack and a reclining chair. It certainly earned me a more than fleeting glance from a couple of car-cops.
I was set up within 20 minutes and soon I was snapping away with the camera. Sitting back while the D50 did its work, I could see that catching these meteors on camera was going to be difficult. There was no shortage of them, indeed for some periods they were showing at a rate of about 50 per hour within my field of view. The problem was that most of them were too fast and they weren't leaving bright trails like the Perseids tend to. I know that I caught at least 50 of them on camera, but, aside from one that left a bright trail, no amount of post-processing of the raw "NEF" files was going to bring out enough detail to make satisfactory images.
I stayed until 02:30, by which time the temperature had dropped to -6 and the camera was frosting up too much to take decent pics (note to self: buy a lens heater-band).
So, here are a few of the resulting images, feel free to mouseover for the annotated versions. There's plenty of room for improvement, I reckon.
Orion and neighbours
Faint trail in Ursa Major (at the top left)
THE SMALL(ish) PRINT... (updated 23/07/2016)
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My God, it's full of stars!
I'm surprised at the f/5.6 aperture. Is there too much light around to use something like f/32? I'm new to this, so am trying to get my head round the best numbers for the jobs. I've not (yet) tried photographing stars.
[quote comment="400"]I'm surprised at the f/5.6 aperture. Is there too much light around to use something like f/32? I'm new to this, so am trying to get my head round the best numbers for the jobs. I've not (yet) tried photographing stars.[/quote]
f/5.6 is the biggest aperture that I get on that lens* (18-55 kit lens). f/5.6 > f/32, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.....hotography
*edit: I've just faffed about with the settings and found a different set-up routine that lets me set f/3.5 @ 18mm, f/5.6 @ 55mm. I'll try that next time, unless I find a cheap w/a prime lens soon. Maybe something like a 24mm?
I'll definitely need to give it a go over the Christmas break. Been trying more in Manual mode rather than Aperture Priority mode