Shooting the Night Sky
While I am not one who is really into stargazing, when a spectacular opportunity is present I will have a go!.
Well, tonight we had that spectacular opportunity in the form of the Comet McNaught.
The media has mentioned that the Comet would be visible with the naked eye over our fair city in a south-westerly direction from just after sunset for a couple of hours.
So, just after dark, we took a peek out at the sky and couldn't see a thing! So, I grabbed my Camera bag and my Tripod and jumped in the car. We live only 5 minutes from a reasonably high hill that overlooks the City and has a pretty clear sky to the South West.
We arrived at about 9:20pm and waled about 50M from the car to the spot where I had previously taken night shots of the city from. For those familiar with Adelaide, it is Range Road in Hermatige.
I selected the 50-200mm zoom lens and mounted the Camera on the Tripod. I didn't even bother to take any sort of meter reading at all. What I did was to set the Camera up to f5.6, 100 ISO in Manual mode. I set the anti-shake to 3 seconds (mirror lock-up) and set the exposure to Bulb.
All I did was to frame my shots and using the Cable release, pressed the button. The first shot I guessed the exposure of around 60 seconds. I was pretty fortunate that the guess was pretty good! At this time, there was still a fair bit of light from the setting sun, and all the city lights in the very bottom of the shot.
What I did over the course of about 45 minutes was to take a total of only 6 shots, each one was a little longer than the previous as the last light was rapidly dissapearing. The last shot was a 244 second exposure. Now, as we all know, the earth is moving, and all photos show a little of the Earth's movement - they all have visible movement of a couple of stars in them.
The first 5 shots were at 50mm - I wanted to try and give some sort of perspective of the scene by including a hint of the city skyline in the pictures. The last one, as the comet was slowly dissapearing, I chose to zoom in and ended up at 79mm.
The comet has an incredibly long tail and really was a spectacular site.
Of course, I put the shots I took into a Gallery for everyone to enjoy!
