What good are fancy new digital cameras if you can't do anything cool with them? This weekend I went back home and decided to take some night photos. So I wander out to the middle of a paddock with my camera setup and laptop and set up camp. I borrowed Thei's remote (which is the only way to lock the shutter open) and took a few long exposures. The first one was about 7 minutes or so and I couldn't work out why it was blurry. Apparently the stars (or in reality, us), spin so fast that anything over 2 minutes has noticable blur to it in a circular pattern. So after taking a few photos at really high ISO speeds I dropped it back to ISO 100, F-stop of 8.0, and locked the shutter open for roughly 20 minutes. 14 minutes into it a car drove right through my photo but I lacked the patience to start again and in hindsight, I wish I had just left it for 40 minutes or so starting after midnight. But I was tired.

The final result being:

You can see a distinct swirly pattern where they're all rotating around the pole, in this case, celestial South. I had to adjust the contrast and brightness quite high for this image because while the original looks good on a backlit LCD, not everyone has that luxury. So the low-light noise from the digital camera becomes a bit more obvious.

Another worthy mention is the ISO 1600 shot. Taken for less than 2 minutes to try avoid the whole 'spinning' problem. It came out relatively bright and not too noisy considering the conditions:

There are a lot more stars than are visible to the human eye. I might have been able to see all of those if the moon wasn't so bright.

The final one from the set that is worth uploading was a photo of Orions belt above our neighbours house, with the lights from Toowoomba reflecting off the clouds:


And that's it from me for tonight. Heaps of other photos to display I'm sure but they can wait until I'm not so tired. It was a long day of wandering and photo taking today. I'm exhausted but it was also relaxing.
Maz