Photographing stars & meteors

After snapping the British Fireworks Champs last night, I quite fancy a
try at the Perseid shower tonight, especially following a lack of aurora
from the mass ejection.

Any tips (Vass - I'm looking at you here) on getting some star trails?
What sort of aperature and exposure times give best results?

 

Denied by local policy. Too entertaining I expect. I'll have a butchers
when I get home.

That said, I know nothing about stacking. At a guess, add as a new layer
in some photoshop-esque program and set the black to transparent. I can
see the appeal there: getting good detail without overexposing, and
getting longer effective exposure without making the aperature too small
for significant trails to occur.

I might do some light painting as well.

 

Was this still at f/5.6 (or f/8)? I would have thought that something
like f/2.8 would be better.

 

I would have thought this too but am going to nip out tonight and see
if we can at least see the meteor shower if not get a piccie or 2

 

We saw a great meteor the other night when out walking the dog. Right
down from the top of the sky, it came - a bright spark trailing a great
bright white stripe all the way to the horizon. Fabulous, but you'd
never have got a camera on it in time.

 

My best fireworks photo was hand-held at ~3-5 seconds, medium open
aperture (somewhere between middle and wide.) I braced my elbows and
held it as still as possible. The slight jiggle added a nice effect
and allowed the colors to show better. Fixing the camera on a tripod
for a long exposure tends to burn fireworks colors to white.

 

really?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/canon-eos/2767723813/

 

ooh nice shot and several others too. Added you as a contact so I can
look through your pics hope you don't mind, if you do... tough titty

 

Four words: "Day of the Triffids"

 

heh, well I can still see, thanks largely to the clouds covering the South
West. There was sort of a gap around 10pm and I saw a couple, but the
hazy layer of cloud made it difficult to see all but the brightest stars.
I didn't even bother getting the camera out.

 

That depends on many factors. At the Finals of the comp this week, I used
a huge variety of settings, and found 2s at f/8 or 4s at f/11 worked best.
I needed to use a tripod due to getting some foreground interest of boats
in the harbour etc. Despite the tripod, I've got some excellent, non-
white colours.

I took 650 shots over 2 nights so I'm still sorting through them looking
for the keepers, but I'm mighty pleased with some of them.

 

Ah, useful to have a tool that does it all for you. Nice shots at the top
of his page too.

 

Nice weather here now, so hopefully that'll stay for this evening and I'll
have another butchers. Tho I'm supposed to be out drinking later, which
limits the opportunity to drive out into the country-side to get into the
darkness.

 

"... a million to one, they said."

 

Did a 30 minute stint last night, saw a "huge" meteor that left a big
trail, but it still didn't show up on the one frame that was going at
the time.

As I found out last night, even the satellites are moving too quick,
although I did have my camera set to ISO 200.

I've made 3 so far and put them on flickr. Feel free to suggest
improvements, most importantly how to not get them come up as a series
of dots, despite having almost no delay between each 30s exposure.

 

As I recall f/4 for 30s.

 

Didn't that article that was suggested suggest f/8 ish??

 

Yes, and... ?

 

and try the f/8 and see if it makes it look more like trails than the
series of dots you were complaining about?

 

Ah, from the context left in above, I had no way of making that
connection. Vass has made the same suggestion too, so I'm getting right
on it. When it's next clear.