While we’re at it, this was up near Spruce Knob Lake, at the campground there. I bought my R10 for birds, not stars, which explains why the shortest lens I had on me was my 35mm prime macro lens. Just for a jape I figured I’d point it at the sky anyway, stick a rock on the crossbar on my tripod, and let 'er rip. ƒ/1.8 which is as wide as it goes, ISO-1600 which may have been a bit much, and noise reduction on so the thing forced me to wait double every time before I could chimp at it.
It is quite astonishing just how long the star trails get even with a mere 30 second exposure. I don’t think it was particularly dark here but it was clear and with fairly low humidity, which helped. I couldn’t get too far out of the trees (at least not without a hike much further than I could be bothered at the time) so I have absolutely no idea where the band of the Milky Way was or if it would have even been clearly visible.
Part of this is probably because this was taken at only 8:49 PM local time, but that was the best chance I had before we got thoroughly mooned.
I took several. This is the only long one I managed without any damned satellites in it at least as far as I noticed.
For comparison:
Thats 1600iso, 24mm, 30s exposure. My trails are shorter, but my lens is wider.Hmm. 30 seconds would be 1/12° of earth rotation. Without knowing how many degrees your image acually spans it’s hard to say precisely but it seems a bit more than that to me.
Near as makes no difference to 35° horizontally, with this combination of lens and camera. 41.73° diagonally, which may be more relevant given the direction of the streaks.
