First Star Trail Shot

This was my first attempt at a night shot. It is at the family ranch in Boise, Idaho. I was only expecting to get a silhouette of chimney rock not a detail of the landscape, especially since it was so black out that even my high intensity flashlight was not enough to light up any portion of the rock to even find it in the view finder.

How is it that it came out with such detail? There are tiny specks of green threw out the landscape at 100% some hot pixels that where removed but it does not seem to be noise like I would expect, any ideas?

Equipment used ; Canon 5D Mark2, 24-105mm, timer remote and Gitzo tripod and clean sensor

ISO 400 40mm f/4.5 451 seconds

AWB was cooled downed to 2939 from 3830 and a bump in tint to get the colors normal

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I actually like it but Im no critique when it comes to these. Ive tried to do them so many times with no success lol

WHat is the technique used to get this type of "trail".......?

Tripod,clear night, patience.... and a headlamp

thanks obnoxoismom, I like it too, but can't understand how the lens and camera can see so much more detail than I in pitch black setting

You said your shutter was open for 451 seconds. That's why you can see so much detail in the dark. There is no such thing as perfect darkness on the surface of the earth. You'll always have light pollution, starlight, or zodiacal light that will illuminate things very dimly. Your eyes can only see the little bit of light that's coming in at that instant, where the camera keeps collecting more light so long as the shutter is open. If you have a leaky faucet dripping into a bucket, eventually it'll fill the bucket. And each photosite in your camera's sensor is like a bucket collecting light.

I think it came out great. I don't think I could get it as perfectly if I tried.

Anakinskids, I like your dripping faucet/bucket analogy, its very deep make perfect sense. The other oddity is that I did one at 550 seconds at f/8 thinking i would get a sharper image, but f/4.5 was the sharper, maybe if i exposed longer it would have gotten sharper

Wonderful photo. Can we see it a bit larger, please?

try this

http://farm5.static.fl​ickr.com …01887547_f5a96d​d278_b.jpg

or tagged under chimney rock

trying to remove some dust spots, Aperture 3 is a pain, so I downloaded cs5 trial and started using the spot healing brush in 16 bit mode, does a better job and with out the spiraling beach ball of death. It was a windy night and alot of pollen from the hay and alfafa feilds blowing right on the lens. at one point it blew over my tripod , but it excaped damage, re oriented the legs and hung a rock off the underside of the tripod

wow you got that much movement in under 8 minutes??? Very nice...

..and gather that much light for the landscape. would like to try longer exposure for longer trails, but that will have to wait

Very nice, I like the shot.