Long exposure picture of Orion

Posted on March 17, 2008 in Astrophotography. - No comments

Here is my first attempt in using my new Canon EOS 400D to do some long exposure images of the night sky. There’s nothing fancy about this shot. I literally opened the front door, shoved the camera and tripod out side and clicked on the shutter button. I didn’t even use the timer to avoid camera shake. This was purely a quick experiment to see what was possible.

As you can see there is an awful lot of light pollution that probably makes longer exposure images a bit of a waste of time. The sky would be far too washed out to make out any of the additional detail. This is the price I pay for living between the bright lights of Bristol and Avonmouth.

Oh, I don’t know if you can see the faint lens-flare? This was caused by the security light on my front door coming on and blinding me which made navigating the doorstep quite “interesting.”

For anyone interested the picture was taken with a shutter speed of 20 seconds and an aperture of F3.5. The camera was also set at ISO-400.

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