Star Trails

I spent a few nights at Grandview Campground in the White Mountains last week. It's remote location, far from any major city and thus far from light and air pollution, make it a very popular place for amateur astrologers and astrophotographers. I got a few long exposure shots there, capturing some star trails.

Those are really neat.

Just maybe a bit too sharp on the transition between sky and hills?

Wazza wrote:
Those are really neat.

Just maybe a bit too sharp on the transition between sky and hills?

It is probably a result of the low-res jpeg. I thought this too, but I bet the full size files look great. Really cool shots. The monochrome is great idea for these.

I think it's a combination of that and a glow at the horizon produced by the long exposure. If you click on the link to the larger version (not quite full size, though) below each picture, you can still see the sharp dividing line, but it doesn't look quite as strong as these smaller versions.

These aren't monochrome, by the way.

Thanks for the comments!

Number 2 and 3 are very nice. thanks for posting the exif info. I've been curious about trying this sort of thing, too.

The last one looked like a monochrome. It must have have been a dark night.

Nice especially the third one, the longer exposure works better but I suspect it wasn't dark enough for that when the first two were made. How was the noise level and does the 10D have the long exposure noise reduction setting? I tried this with a D60 with one hour exposures and the noise was so extreme the images were useless.

the 'atmosphere' all over must have been great

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some beautiful sight to behold

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MCB wrote:
Number 2 and 3 are very nice. thanks for posting the exif info. I've been curious about trying this sort of thing, too.

It takes a little experimenting to get it right, but the results are a lot of fun. This was the fourth time I've tried it.

It was pretty dark. Like I mentioned, I was pretty far from any large cities, so the only light I had to work with was what came from the sky. There was a waxing crescent moon, but it was in the early stages and went down pretty early, so the stars were pretty much it.

Oh, I forgot to mention, that bright spot in the middle of the first two shots was a campfire on the other side of the campground. I positioned the cameras so the campfire was behind some trees to keep it from completely blowing out that part of the picture.

Yes, the first two were done at the same time, while there was still a little sunlight left in the sky. The third picture was taken about an hour or two later after darkness had really settled in.

I had very little noise to deal with from either camera. I only had maybe a dozen hot pixels to clone out from each picture. I did that manually during post-processing, and didn't create a black frame to cancel them out or use the 20D's noise reduction function (which the 10D does not have). I haven't tried taking this any further than 30 minutes yet, but I think next time I do this I'll see how the cameras do with a one hour exposure.

Thanks for the comment, Marie!

The more I look at them, the more I like them. Really neat. I've been wanting to try a similar technique, but it has been so humid I've been afraid it would damage the camera. Is there any fact to support my fear?

I couldn't really say. I've never been concerned about that, but we don't have much of a humidity problem out here.

Neat shots, really cool effect

I really like long exposures and these reinforce why. Thanks for sharing...