melev

As my vacation was coming to its conclusion, I looked up last night and was blown away by the vast number of stars I could see. It was dark, the moon was essentially new, and I was in the mood to try and capture a few images. I called up Jessy to remind me of the settings I'd need for my Nikon D90...

She recommended ISO 1000, f/3.5, Manual Mode, focus set to infinity, and to use my infrared remote after setting the camera to "bulb" (the next point past 30 seconds per image). With my camera mounted to its tripod, I began aiming at various places in the sky, and shot images that took between 20 and 45 seconds. I tried longer periods, like once for 2 minutes, but it was washed out and the stars moved due to the earth's rotation.

I probably took 25 pictures or so, but most are of the stars themselves. Jessy recommended I get some landmarks in the images, like a tree, a mountain, a building... see for yourself if you like these.

Because RA tends to overlap the first few images with the blog options on the right, I made these four thumbnails. The full images are 1024 pixels wide, and appear beneath that nefarious column, below. Hopefully the room you are viewing these in is dark.




















The images were cleaned up in Photoshop: adding more blue, reducing the red, and darkening them (using Adjust Levels). Unsharp Mask set to Radius .03 at 125% made them more crisp.