I was shooting 30 seconds, f2 or f2.8 @ 800 ISO. Exposures longer than 30 seconds will show trails.

If anyone wants to join me, I'm going up on one of the weekends. It will depend on weather and the forest fire situation though. I've managed to borrow a GPS star tracker to mount the Canon 500mm f4! W00t!

http://www.merrittastronomical.com/index.html

It's time to upgrade my camera. I took these using bulb, and even then, the camera would only let me open the shutter for 90sec tops. As a result, super tough to get the camera still.



http://lh6.ggpht.com/_RlBlRdp4hCE/TF...0/DSC_1186.JPG


Big Dipper
http://lh6.ggpht.com/_RlBlRdp4hCE/TF...2/DSC_3555.JPG



What's the best camera for taking star photos? Something FF like the 5Dm2?

Aperture wide open, and you can go several seconds without noticeable star trails... even up to a minute, you should only see a very slight stretching of them.

If you want still stars and you're using a high resolution camera, you wouldn't want to go past 30 seconds, as trails are noticeable at 100%. Of course this will all depend on how big the final images will be - my shots look fine on the web, but at 100% you can see trails.

The best DLSR for astrophotography is any DSLR with the low-pass filter removed. For stock DSLR's, Canon used to make cameras specifically for astrophotography like the 20Da, 30Da, but they have been discontinued. Currently, Canon DSLR's seem to be the cameras to use, as Nikons process the RAW files on the sensor (Sony sensors, remember) resulting in unwanted noise.

My images were so dark because of the lack of any ambient city light, etc. and the fact that they were all taken at approx midnight at 6300ft elevation. They were 30 second exposures at f2.8 ISO800.

Full size, you can see the trails, smaller/on the web, the trails are less noticeable/not noticeable.

One thing that I did notice, it being so dark, was that I had a hot-pixel which I've since remapped.