Two nights ago, it was clear and warm.  I decided that I wanted to try my hand at star trail photography, because I find astrophotography in general pretty fascinating.  It took a while for me to find a spot to focus my camera, because at 10:00 at night, it’s rather dark, and being totally new to this process, I couldn’t get my camera to focus on a silhouette of one of the trees in our hedge row.  Not for lack of trying, mind you, but most likely from lack of total preparation.  I played around with multiple exposure settings, to see which f stop would work best, how long to time the exposure, etc.

This shot in particular was a two minute exposure at f11.  I think, given I didn’t sit long enough with the camera to produce star trails (four minutes started to show what I hope to be a great image once I get the technique down), that this beginner’s shot isn’t too shabby.  I had the camera set to high noise reduction, so processing in camera took quite some time, once I felt the shot was complete.

Tonight will be a nice clear night, and over the next few weeks there are going to be three separate meteor showers.  With any luck, I’ll have not only captured the shot I’m looking for, but maybe a stray shooting star or two!

I found a few different sites that I think are great resources for astrophotography and star trail photography:

http://www.astropix.com/HTML/I_ASTROP/QUICK.HTM

http://www.olegnovikov.com/technical/startrails/startrails.shtml