Meteor

Tanuki

I decided to try my hand at astrophotography recently. My first exposure wasn't quite right, so I made an adjustment and pressed the shutter a second time. Barely a moment had passed into the exposure when my wife said "Look, a meteor!" I fully expected it to be gone before I had a chance to look up, but to my surprise it was still there and continued streaking across the sky for well over 5 seconds. I couldn't believe my luck to have captured it in a photo. It's probably one of those "had to be there" things, but I thought maybe it would be of interest to astronomy buffs.

Photo details: D300 at ISO 3200 and f/4 for 15 seconds. The lens was a Sigma 10-20mm set at 10mm.

dlplumer

Fantastic shot. I'd like to see it run through Noise Ninja.

Dan

Awais Yaqub

Splendid photograph !

jeffmeyers

Very lucky and cool shot!

Shootin1st

Very cool colors.

Corehead

Sigh and boo hoo: I SO WISH I had a camera of any sort when Comet Hyakutake streaked across the central Arizona (and other skies) back in the winter of 1997 (I think).

Hailey's Comet had NOTHING on that: a week after I first noticed the merest smudge of Hyakutake. that tail stretched across the entire sky!!!

Now if you can dredge up anything about Hyakutake in your astronomical archives, why, let's ALL take a look-see!

Steve-o

Tanuki wrote:

I decided to try my hand at astrophotography recently. My first exposure wasn't quite right, so I made an adjustment and pressed the shutter a second time. Barely a moment had passed into the exposure when my wife said "Look, a meteor!" I fully expected it to be gone before I had a chance to look up, but to my surprise it was still there and continued streaking across the sky for well over 5 seconds. I couldn't believe my luck to have captured it in a photo. It's probably one of those "had to be there" things, but I thought maybe it would be of interest to astronomy buffs.

Photo details: D300 at ISO 3200 and f/4 for 15 seconds. The lens was a Sigma 10-20mm set at 10mm.

Tanuki

Shootin1st wrote:

Very cool colors.

The orange light is from sodium vapor street lamps in town.

Tanuki

Corehead wrote:

Sigh and boo hoo: I SO WISH I had a camera of any sort when Comet Hyakutake streaked across the central Arizona (and other skies) back in the winter of 1997 (I think).

Hailey's Comet had NOTHING on that: a week after I first noticed the merest smudge of Hyakutake. that tail stretched across the entire sky!!!

Now if you can dredge up anything about Hyakutake in your astronomical archives, why, let's ALL take a look-see!

Steve-o

I wish I had astonomical archives! My entire life, I've never lived in a place where I could see the Milky Way. My only opportunities are on vacations.

Here's another photo I took in the other direction, with the intention of capturing the Milky Way. Although we could see the Milky Way very clearly with our eyes, it didn't show up at all in the photo. I have seen other photographers capture the Milky Way with similar exposures, so I'm thinking that it might be because of Nikon's meddling with the RAW data as explained here. I wish I had thought of trying the "Mode 3" workaround when I was shooting. Oh well, there's always next vacation.



After I realized I wasn't going to get the Milky Way shot, I decided just to make do with what I had, and came up with the following.

drake

What a great picture.