Tonight I had fun trying to reproduce this APOD.
For the first round of images I programed my remote timer to take a 10 second exposure every 30 seconds. That gave me more than enough time to adjust the focus and the camera to do its noise reduction thing. I started with the focus dial turned all the way to right (as far away from focus as possible), and then moved it a little bit left between each exposure. When I reached the far left I repeated the process going from left to right. The result you can see to the left.
I like it. It looks like strange star birds flying in Orion formation. ;) And check out the beautiful colors: most of the stars are blue giants, Betelgeuse is a red supergiant and then there is the purple Orion Nebula.
The camera focuses at infinity a little while before the focus dial reaches the far left, so the stars looks like toffees rather than butterflies. The individual stars wobble a bit between the exposures, probably due to a combination of the strong wind and my unsteady dial-turning hand.
For the second round of images I programed my remote timer to take a 10 second exposure every 20 seconds, and I tried to make smaller changes to the focus for each step.
The wings are more smooth but the centre is still a bit bumpy. I did consider going out again for a third round but the cold got the better of me (and I even wore two jackets), so that will have to wait for another clear night.
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