I had my first go at photographing fireworks last night. It turned out to be very fun and extremely rewarding – I think the photos look amazing! I have posted some of my favourite shots below.

Photographing fireworks is similar to astrophotography: you need a tripod and a remote timer as you want to take relatively long exposures that are timed with the exploding lights. Even though the fireworks were much closer than what I usually photograph on the sky, setting the focus at infinity seemed to work just fine. Since the light from the fireworks were so bright, I quickly learned to turn down the ISO to a mere 100 and to use an aperture of f/8. I pointed the camera in a hopefully fruitful direction, and with the remote timer in the hand I then waited for the sound of a rocket going up. That was my signal to push the button and start the exposure. As soon as the last light died out I released again, giving an exposure time of 1-3 seconds.

The initial rough aligning went fine, but I had problems finding Polaris in the finderscope. Just when I was about to give up, an airplane crossed the sky right under the star allowing for an easy identification. I couldn’t see the scope’s internal reticle very clearly, so I just centered Polaris in the field of view. I then mounted my camera and pointed it at Cassiopeia. Finally, I turned on the motor and the small gears began to hum quietly.

I must have done something right, for my 3 minute long exposure of the sky showed no sign of the Earth’s rotation. :)

My initial plan was to use my new motorized equatorial mount, but that was perhaps a bit too ambitious. I had not yet practiced aligning it, and standing outside in the dark fumbling with the numerous controls was very frustrating. When the first meteors started to draw trails across the sky I gave up and went inside to get my faithful tripod.

After a bit of fumbling with the focus, I set the camera to take a series of 10 second exposures and stepped back to watch the show. Imagine my joy when a clear meteor shot across the sky right in my field of view! :) I caught a total of three meteors before clouds started drifting in. The first – my first ever! – was also the most luminous. The three most luminous stars in the image are part of the Draco constellation.

I also had my first go at light graffiti. During a normal exposure I shone a laser at some dark trees and drew a figure. It took a couple of tries to get it right. The trees were so far away that even the smallest movements were blown up, so the figure is a bit shaky.

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.

I pointed my camera at Vega, focused and started shooting a series of images. Because Vega is relatively far from Polaris it moves quite fast across the sky. I wanted each image to show nearly point like stars, so I only exposed each image for 30 seconds.

For some reason all the images came out wrong. Or at least not as I had intended. The camera seemed less sensitive to the light, and increasing the ISO did not help that much. Also, the colors are very dark. I do not know why. I hope it has something to do with the weather conditions that night and is not a permanent problem. I am a bit worried about frost damage from the night before.

I noticed the problems on my first couple of test images but I decided to continue. I took about 60 exposures before the cold got too intense and I hurried home. Turns out that last night was one of the coldest nights in the past 12 years.

I used Photoshop to stack the images as usual. But this time I did something a little different. I have seen people use Morse code to write their names in the stars and thought: why not let Vega write its own name? This is why I wanted short exposures, images where the stars are dots in stead of dashes.

Despite the exposure and color problems I think the result is pretty cool. You can really see the different colours of the stars. Vega is of course the bright white star in the middle, and the orange shimmer near the horizon is light from the city Aalborg reflected by cirrostratus clouds. Come another clear night I will try again, maybe with a different star.

Like the previous night I started by pointing my camera directly at Polaris. This time, however, I programmed my remote timer to take many short exposures in stead of one long exposure. I used an ISO of 400 and maximum aperture. Each exposure was 1 minute long, and there was a gap of 1 second between them. After nearly two hours the battery in my camera died and left me with 117 images.

I used Photoshop to stack the images. On a few of them an airplane had passed through or a speck suddenly appeared but I decided to use them anyway to avoid creating gaps in the star trails. I think the specks might have been satellites passing through. According to Stellarium the satellite Radio Sputnik 15 was roughly in the same position at the same time as this speck:

The first hour’s worth of images produced the following star trails:

Pretty, isn’t it? :) I especially like how the different colours of the stars stand out. The bright blue-white stars in the top left corner are part of the Cassiopeia constellation, and the single bright white star all the way to the right is part of the Big Dipper.

After nearly two hours the star trails looked like this:

For some reason the background in the second half of the images was a lot lighter than the background in the first half of the images. I suspect it had something to do with the camera getting warmer and thus producing more noise. The two hour long star trails did not stand out as much as the one hour long star trails did, but they were long! :)

When the camera battery had recharged I pointed the camera west towards a group of trees. Time for some scenic star trails! Repeating the procedure from last time, I took a series of 1 minute long exposures. After shooting 79 images the camera’s battery died again. When I went to get the camera I noticed that the camera and the tripod were covered in rime and that the lens was all fogged up. I am just glad the camera toughed it out long enough to take 79 images.

Going through the images in Photoshop I found an airplane in two of the last images. To avoid any gaps in the trails I just removed the last images from the stack which left me with 73 images – more than one hour of action.

I must admit I was amazed by the result. The star trails are so beautiful, and the dark trees really complete the image. It almost looks as though I know what I am doing. ;)

Last night offered a few hours of clear sky. Since there is much less light pollution here I decided to try a long exposure with low ISO and a not-so-big aperture. I pointed my camera at Polaris, focused and started the exposure. During the next couple of hours I spend most of the time inside, once in a while checking that there was no clouds drifting in and that the batteries were still working. After two hours I ended the exposure and transferred the image to my computer. But what I saw was very disappointing.

The image was overexposed, but I had expected that. I had saved the image using both RAW and high resolution JPEG. While the RAW image was saved about two hours after I started the exposure, the JPEG image was saved just a few minutes after. Both images insisted that they had only been exposed for 474 seconds, yet the star trails seemed much longer than that. I have no clue what happened.

The trails were very faint, so I guess the ISO was too low. Also, clouds must have drifted in while I was looking away, because the bottom third of the image was all hazy. Finally (and most embarrassingly) I had forgotten to clean the lens, so there were a few smudges on the image.

I used Photoshop to lower the exposure and increase the contrast in an attempt to make the faint star trails stand out more. Though the length of the star trails is cool, the final image is pretty crappy. But I have learned my lesson: next time I will take many short exposures and combine them.

For the first half hour the sky was crystal clear, and I took a series of images of the Orion constellation. I used the noise reduction function in my camera, which means that every exposure took twice as long (i.e. 10 seconds for the exposure of the sky and then 10 seconds for a dark exposure), but since all my exposure were relatively short, I figured that was the easiest way to go. When I came home I used Photoshop to stack the images. Although I have never tried that before and was a bit unsure of what I was doing, I think the result looks nice. You can even see the Orion Nebula.

I also took a few images of Cassiopeia but in that part of the sky, the star trails made it too difficult for me and my humble stacking skills to make the constellation stand out.

Finally I pointed my camera at Polaris. I have always liked the long exposure astrophotos that show how the stars move in circular trails around the North Star. I set the exposure time at 10 minutes but had to cut it short since clouds started drifting in. Still, I managed to completely overexpose the image.

After a lot of tweaking in Photoshop (I have no idea what I did) I succeeded in bringing out the star trails. They are a lot shorter than what I had in mind, though. The next time I try this, I should probably take a lot of short exposures over a period of an hour or so with the camera pointing in a fixed direction and then combine them.

When I came outside I discovered that a thin patchwork of clouds were covering the skies. I decided to take a few shots anyway. Because I am still very unsure of whether I am focusing right or using the right exposure, I tried to use a method called bracketing. It simply means that you take a photograph using the setting you think is correct, and then also take a number of photographs where you make small adjustments in some of the settings. I took about 30 photos with various combinations of ISO speed, shutter speed and focus, and I think the result was surprisingly nice.