Cold with a Chance of Fog
After a tough day of what I like to call ‘Extreme Gardening’ I was quite tired and achy. Extreme Gardening is when you take on bushes, trees and whatever else gets in your way that have been left to grow unchecked for years. Everything is bigger and stronger than it should be!
The weather was somewhat unpredictable and the moon was showing. This meant that this would be practice more than anything so I decided to stay fairly local. After a few test shots and different shutter speeds and ISOs I decided to settle for 60 second exposures and 640 ISO. I made a mistake while using the 500 rule but more about that later. I had my spot and my settings. All I needed now was to start taking shots. I set up my intervalometer to take around 150 pictures at 60 seconds each. Below are the results. Note the fog that arrived towards the end of the video!
Mistakes Capitalised On
I initially wanted to have a single image of Orion with the lowest possible noise. I was trying long exposures (up to 60 seconds) and low ISO (as low as 100 but settled for 640). On top of this, I wanted to image stack at least 8 images using a median filter to try and further reduce noise. However, as I made a mistake with the 500 rule as mentioned above, the stars started to trail in the images. I would not be able to use them how I wanted.
All was not lost. I thought about it, since the stars had started to trail in every image, I thought a startrail might look cool. I downloaded the somewhat archaic Startrails Software. You could tell it was made a long time ago (2005 to be exact) but it suited for this purpose. I selected all the images up until the fog rolled in (about 120) and let it do its thing. When it was finished I saved the image out.
120 image Startrail stack – 8mm Ff/1.8, ISO 640, 60 secondsIf you have any like my work or want to see what I’ve been up to, please check out and like/follow my website, my 500px, my Facebook, my Instagram and my Twitter.
