Last night was the first clear night in weeks. Although I have not bought a tripod yet, I could not miss the opportunity. I live in Copenhagen where there is so much light pollution that you can barely see any stars, so I packed my equipment and went north to visit my parents. They live in Hillerød and although light pollution is also an issue there, their relatively dark back yard made a fine place for my first experiments.
I do not have that much equipment to play with yet, so I had to make do with my Canon 350D camera, my remote timer, my dad’s old semi-broken and thus highly unstable tripod and a very red chair. I also brought extra batteries for the remote control (turned out to be a good idea) and a pair of binoculars to keep me entertained when the camera was working.
I first went out at around 20:00. The Moon was still up and my primary goal was to get used to the equipment. I tried to use the Moon to focus my camera on infinity, but that did not work out very well. The image on the right is supposed to look like the Pleiades. Instead I managed to focus by manually adjusting the focus and taking test exposures. I then took a series of photos of the Pleiades and Orion with a focal length of 55mm and a shutter speed of 20 seconds. It turned out that the field of view was too small for that combination to work, so all the stars came out elongated because of the Earth’s rotation. I did manage to take one picture that I like. By a mistake I used a shutter speed of 9 seconds which made it the only picture free of field rotation. And yes, the bright spot is Jupiter. :) I think Uranus is also in the picture, but it is so faint that it looks like a normal star.
Before I went inside I noticed an airplane crossing the sky and I decided to capture it in a long exposure. The airplane’s lights were blinking periodically so the result was a funny bubbling line.
At midnight I went out again. The Moon had set and I was hoping to see some meteors (after all, the Geminids was going to peak the following night). I programmed my camera to take 40 shots of 20 seconds each and pointed it at Gemini. When I came back I learned the importance of tightening all screws: the camera had slowly tipped back and was pointing straight op. Stupid old tripod. ;)
I began to take a few pictures of the Pleiades but then clouds started drifting in. They ended up covering the whole sky, so I went back inside. I did manage to get a couple of decent shots of the seven sisters, though. :)
All in all I had an awesome night! I learned a lot and I cannot wait to get out there again.