Meteor Shower Tonight

[MiniChris]

Well, actually it will peak at 5:00 am CST. I want to do a mirror up, bulb shot to both capture star trails and catch some of those pesky meteors which at 5:00 should see up to 100 per hour. Any suggestiosn as to time, aperture, etc.

[UtopianStardust]

I know this might be quite random, but I have a question.

Would it be possible to do long exposures of the night sky on a TMAX 400 flm? Thank you! [:

[MiniChris]

yes...and I think I know from whence you are coming, and yes, I would probably go that route if there were no answers on here and while film does have some latitude issues, repricosity failure, etc to overcome, I am not sure of a number of things regarding digital....one, for tomorrow morning, the windchill factor is supposed to be below 10 degree F. Is it a good idea to leave my camera out for an extended time frame or should I wrap that little puppy up once I've set everything. Do I set my ISO at 400, or go significantly higher and if I go higher, am I likely to have too much noise???

[UtopianStardust]

But how long do you think it's okay to expose the film before it turns pitch black?

[MiniChris]

At ISO 400, F:/16 or 22 you should be fine for 30 minutes or more without any problems. If you are shooting stars, an hour at 22 wouldn't be out of the question. I thought you were making reference that shooting film and digital are the same...and in some cases, I am thinking this is so, but not this one. You might want to consider a fine grain developer and go for a weaker dilution, longer development time.

[MiniChris]

Fortunately, it seems I have a function in my camera that allows me to take pictures at intervals for extended periods of time. So, I am going to set it up for 1 minute exposures with 30 second pauses and do a series of ten. I just discovered if I set up the camera to 800 ISO, f:22, manual focus already set, I can fit my heaviest wool tobaggan over everything but the lens. It will take a large rubber band to secure the open end. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention. I think I am ready. Hopefully, I'll be able to post before I leave for school.

[Peter Ryan]

When I shot star trails with film I used f5.6 at ISO100 for an hour.

There was a lot of discussion about star trails here not long ago. I am sure this will help.

[Colin Southern]

Just curious folks, why would you want to increase noise by going to the likes of ISO 400 / 800? It's not like DoF is going to be an issue, so I'd be shooting around F4 / F5.6 @ ISO 100. Shutterspeed really doesn't enter into it (exposure wise) as your subject is moving, so the brightness of the subject isn't affected by the length of the exposure, just the length of the trace.



715s @ f/2.8 @ 25.0mm @ iso100

[UtopianStardust]

Wow these are some helpful tips! Thanks folks, really helped!

[MiniChris]

Too much info on the internet (my info came from an observatory)...and, I was really wanting to get the meteors and not the trails. Saw some awesome streakers this morning, but evidently, I didn't fully understand the workings of the interval timer as I didn't get squat and given the one file size shown, it didn't go on for as long as I programmed it to...oh well, first timers not so good fortune.