Poletrails

Two other things Seanie.
Taking startrails with a DSLR is going to suck the life out of your battery
but more importantly long startrail exposures will have a big build up of camera noise and battery glow.

Barberskum wrote:

Two other things Seanie.
Taking startrails with a DSLR is going to suck the life out of your battery
but more importantly long startrail exposures will have a big build up of camera noise and battery glow.

That's true Frank, and the conundrum for us all in taking long exposures. Hence my avid curiosity about stacking shorter exposures to get longer, neater, trail photos. To be honest, that is something I never thought of before myself, yet it seems so simple! :blush:

Seanie.

Seanie,

It all comes down to how fast the flash card is ... and these days we have faster and faster cards. Also shooting in JPEG rather than RAW format helps significantly due to the smaller files.

I remember with my 4x card needing 7-8 seconds to write each image. With my new Kingston 40x card, it is at a blink of an eye.

Anthony.

Seanie,

Because I set up the camera to shoot continuously, the time between shots is only a couple of seconds. Next time I'll hook the camera up to the laptop and use continuous remote shooting and download direct to the PC, this seems to be a lot faster than writing to the Flash card. Also it automates the whole process. You can just set it up to take as many frames as you want using the Canon EOS Utility software. This is very handy as you can assure your focus is spot on before you go shooting 60 frames or so. Give it a try - (I didn't do this on the shot above and any gaps you see might be because the focus wasn't perfect, later I sussed out the focus using the EOS utility and I don't think I'll ever go back to relying on the viewfinder to check the focus.) The shot above was really only a test of the lens and the technique, next time there's a clear night I'll do a proper job.

Thanks for the tips guys. My flash card is not the fastest, but it is fast. I also think the laptop would be a better tool to store the images because you can direct-view right after you've taken the images. Something for me to try in the future I hope.

Seanie.

Seanie,

When you have some time, do some testing to see if you have better response (ie. throughput) when writing to your fastest available flash card or to your computer via USB.

Here are two examples of star trail photos using the same EOS camera but two different speed flash cards:

(1) www.perseus.gr/Astro-Star-Trails-2005-08-13.htm (4x CF card)
(2) www.perseus.gr/Astro-Star-Trails-2008-08-12.htm (40x CF card)

It is scarry how so rudimentary equipment/set-up can produce such nice results.

Anthony.