New moon and for once clear skies and a meteor shower! Going to try my hand at capturing star trails tonight.
it will be about 32 deg F. I have no idea what that is Celsius but it is just about freezing. I can not find hand warmers to put in the lens anywhere. My question is do I really have to worry about my lens freezing? what if I wrapped a scarf, (honestly not sure how i will do that yet.) I really don't expect to be out for that many hours, but who knows.
Also if i am shooting for 2 hours is one battery enough? I am shooting with a nikon battery.
There is nothing in the lens that will freeze, lenses will keep working well below freezing. You may experience a small amount of condensation forming on the lens if you quickly move it from a warm environment to a cold environment, although that typically happens the other way round. You can avoid this by keeping the lens in a sealed plastic bag until it has time to acclimatise to the temperature differential. I wouldn't worry about keeping the lens warm.
Batteries will last a much shorter time in very cold conditions, so be careful. Are you going to be stacking photographs or taking one long exposure? If you are taking a long exposure you really need to enable long exposure noise reduction, which will take a dark frame shot after your main shot. This will take as long to do as the main shot took (so if you do a 2 hour exposure, the camera will take a further 2 hours to do the noise reduction). This means your battery needs to last for 4 hours of continuous use, which in cold conditions I wouldn't advise unless the battery is nearly new. If the battery runs out then you'll almost certainly lose the entire shot.
If you're doing stacking shots, which is generally a much better idea for star trails as you get better quality and less noise, it doesn't really matter -- you can just keep shooting until the battery dies, or you get too cold, whichever happens first!
Note that it will have to be an incredibly bright meteor to show up at all on a star trail photo. If you want to capture meteors you want to be doing starfield photography, which is shorter exposures at very high ISO sensitivities.
Good look. I plan on having another attempt at this soon. Really valid points about condensation. On my second time I had this issue but pics came out ok in the end
@abirkill@andycoleborn@btorrey@brav
What a night! I can say I tried and look forward to doing it again but the biggest challenge is finding a quiet dark spot in the suburbs. I did get to see some beautiful shooting stars. these are the 2 shots i managed.
Alexis thank you so very much you advice helped a lot. i look forward to trying again soon.
@sunshinephoto5 Really great shots, well done for persevering! Sorry to hear about your troubles with the law!
In your second photo, you've got one misaligned shot -- your tripod must have moved. This has caused some apparently-stationary stars to appear in your shot. You can see that there is a fixed offset between the stationary stars and the trails:
You should be able to go through the images and work out which one it is (it's almost certainly the first or last image) and remove it from your stack.
Your star trails are also slightly 'dotty' --there are gaps in between them. This suggests that you had a gaps between each exposure. Did you have long exposure noise reduction on? For star trails photos you really need to disable this, as well as enabling burst mode and locking the shutter open. A gap of more than 1-2 seconds between shots will make the trails appear 'dotty' like this.
Not sure if you did use StarStaX to stack the images, but if so it also has a mode that can be used to try and fix this:
@abirkill Alexis thank for all the help! I did you use StarStax got it from your link thanks so much. It is a very easy program to use, although i did not really use the processing only used the stacking. I actually don't mind Orian's Belt in this photo, they were so clear and amazing to see.
There was definitely timing gaps in my photos, I turned it off every dang time a car drove at me. And to be honest I did not have the timer set at all on the camera, I could not figure out how to set it :( so I was tripping it by remote. So given the less than ideal shooting conditions I think it was not an epic fail and I did enjoy being out there last night in spite of all the annoying people.
I hope to try again when we go up to the mountains for the New Years weekend and hope that I can figure out how to set the interval timer on my camera by then.
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Batteries will last a much shorter time in very cold conditions, so be careful. Are you going to be stacking photographs or taking one long exposure? If you are taking a long exposure you really need to enable long exposure noise reduction, which will take a dark frame shot after your main shot. This will take as long to do as the main shot took (so if you do a 2 hour exposure, the camera will take a further 2 hours to do the noise reduction). This means your battery needs to last for 4 hours of continuous use, which in cold conditions I wouldn't advise unless the battery is nearly new. If the battery runs out then you'll almost certainly lose the entire shot.
If you're doing stacking shots, which is generally a much better idea for star trails as you get better quality and less noise, it doesn't really matter -- you can just keep shooting until the battery dies, or you get too cold, whichever happens first!
Note that it will have to be an incredibly bright meteor to show up at all on a star trail photo. If you want to capture meteors you want to be doing starfield photography, which is shorter exposures at very high ISO sensitivities.
There's a document I put together for my local Meetup group that may prove useful and explains the different techniques:
https://docs.google.com/a/alexisbirkill.com/document/d/1l1nf4fmFAWddif-wgUrRQGWVviinr7fe9Y-7HRZ0cpQ/edit
Let me know if you have any questions!
What a night! I can say I tried and look forward to doing it again but the biggest challenge is finding a quiet dark spot in the suburbs. I did get to see some beautiful shooting stars. these are the 2 shots i managed.
Alexis thank you so very much you advice helped a lot. i look forward to trying again soon.
In your second photo, you've got one misaligned shot -- your tripod must have moved. This has caused some apparently-stationary stars to appear in your shot. You can see that there is a fixed offset between the stationary stars and the trails:
You should be able to go through the images and work out which one it is (it's almost certainly the first or last image) and remove it from your stack.
Your star trails are also slightly 'dotty' --there are gaps in between them. This suggests that you had a gaps between each exposure. Did you have long exposure noise reduction on? For star trails photos you really need to disable this, as well as enabling burst mode and locking the shutter open. A gap of more than 1-2 seconds between shots will make the trails appear 'dotty' like this.
Not sure if you did use StarStaX to stack the images, but if so it also has a mode that can be used to try and fix this:
http://www.markus-enzweiler.de/starstax_gapfilling_tutorial/ssx_gapfilling_tutorial.html
There was definitely timing gaps in my photos, I turned it off every dang time a car drove at me. And to be honest I did not have the timer set at all on the camera, I could not figure out how to set it :( so I was tripping it by remote. So given the less than ideal shooting conditions I think it was not an epic fail and I did enjoy being out there last night in spite of all the annoying people.
I hope to try again when we go up to the mountains for the New Years weekend and hope that I can figure out how to set the interval timer on my camera by then.