Photographing the night sky with my grandson

[Lowell]

Last year my 16 yer old grandson took a photography class in school which consisted with a series of assignments requiring all sorts of photography.  In April, one assignment was to photograph the night sky.  So we studied up and picked a clear night.  These two images resulted from our excursion.  We drove up into the mountains to find a place with somewhat lower light pollution.  The first shot is to the south east.  The light pollution come from the city just over the mountains.  Shot with a D800E and my lowly 24mm F/2.8D.  I turned off in-camera NR and set took 10 minute exposures.  The second was to do an about face, find Polaris and point the camera up to the mountain crest behind us.  Less light pollution in this direction.  What a treat!  A plane flew through the view.  We were really happy to see that we had picked up a meteor. 

In post processing, I used Neat Image to reduce noise.  It worked much better than the in-camera NR.

Comments

Lowell

[armando_m]

Fun ! particularly when you go with a son or grandson

[Lowell]

Thanks Armando,

Great fun with him\, especially when we recognized the path of the meteor.

Lowell

[Akira]

Really nice star trails!  The meteor should be highly praised at your grand son's school.

I also like the reddish light cast on the mountain in the first image.

[Lowell]

Akira,

Thank you for your comment.  The light on this face of the mountain was from the moon which had come up over the horizon,  behind and to the left of the camera position.   If I remember correctly, it was almost a full moon so in a 10 minute exposure time, there was detectable illumination of this side of the mountain.   When the airplane came directly towards our location, I was initially disappointed because I could see it was heading directly for the field of view we were photographing.  When I saw the blinking track of the airplane and the trace of the meteor in the image, I realized that these were interesting additions to the composition.

Lowell

[Akira]

Lowell, thank you for the details of the shooting environment.

The location ant the time was perfect for the assignment.