Astrophotograph version 0.0
Armed with my new camera and clear Canada skies, I made my first attempt at astrophotography tonight.
One big challenge was the 40 cm of snow on the ground coupled with a 5-inch tall tripod. Andrew and I borrowed a plastic tray from his mom for me to set the camera on. However, this meant that I either needed to point the camera and see what came out, or crouch in the snow to see if I could figure out what was in the lens. I did the former, so bascially I didn’t know what would come out until the shutter closed and I looked at the resulting picture.
I set the shutter to stay open for 60 seconds (the maximum allowed by my camera). I didn’t set the film speed, but I think it was on ISO 50 — unfortunatley, I think that’s the least light sensitive. The next time I try this, I’ll step through the different ISO settings and the shutter settings. I also want to get a taller tripod.
The first couple of pictures didn’t turn out, and it was fairly cold, so I was ready to give up. Then I got this way cool picture of Orion.
Bolstered by this, Andrew and I decided that it wasn’t quite as cold as we’d thought. I took a couple pointed straight up at the sky, and caught Auriga, Taurus and the Pleiades (click on the image to get to the Flickr pages with the constellations marked).
Andrew and I think we might try and go back to Creek Crossing Farm, where we stayed for our honeymoon, and play around with my camera sometime next year. Maybe we could time it with a meteor shower — that would be way cool.