Astrophotography

Thanksgiving with my wife's family was great.  It always help to remind me of life's priorities.  Today we get our second Thanksgiving with my family.  It's been a great arrangement for us that my family always does Thanksgiving the day after.  Sometimes we change it up and do Mexican food, or Italian.  I'm very thankful for family, friends, and photography.

While hunting with my brothers I did some astrophotography.  Something about all those stars helps to put this world in perspective.  I love it when you can see the milky way rather than having to pick out the  ten lonely stars in the bright city sky.  Ideally, I'd have a moving tripod head that would track the stars, but I'm not there yet.  So, I do what I do... try to keep the exposure short so that the stars don't turn into streaks.  Using a wide angle also means less motion visible since the distances of movement become smaller.  It doesn't take very long at all for the stars to turn into streaks.  Here is a picture of the constellation Orion.  At thirteen seconds and with my 50mm lens it is already starting to streak a bit.  The JPEG compression here doesn't do it justice, but you can see a satellite's orange streak across the picture too towards the top middle.  Or at least you can in the original.

ISO200  50mm  f/1.8  13s

Here are a couple with the sun just getting ready to rise.  I was trying to shorten up the shutter speed, but you can see the noise pour right in as the ISO goes higher and higher.

ISO3200  50mm  f/1.8  2.5s

ISO800  18mm  f/3.5  4s

Now that I'm going through these photos again, I really should have done some experimentation with the exposure to see if the stars could look sharper rather than just like blown out lights.  Which they end up looking like if you follow the camera's meter like I did.  Another experiment for next time I'm in the great outdoors.