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| It's Geminid Meteor Shower Time Again - Page 1 | |
| 13th - 14th December 2015 | Rate Topic |
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| Posted: Tue Dec 8th, 2015 07:18 |
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1st Post |
Robert
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The Geminid Meteor shower is due on 13th -14th December, it's an annual event in the astronomy calendar. Apparently the show starts up to a week before and tails off during the week after so if the appointed night is clouded over then there are other options. The peak time to view is about 2am no mater where you are located. Along with my attempts to capture moonlit landscapes I want to try to capture more meteor showers if I can. I am fortunate in being only a few minutes drive from several high vantage points which don't suffer too badly from light pollution, so it's a good opportunity for me. Not being particularly well clued up on astronomy techniques I did a search and this is one of the results I came up with. http://earthsky.org/space/everything-you-need-to-know-geminid-meteor-shower#watch This evening is forecast clear, so armed with my recent experience in Glenridding and the info in the link above, I plan a sorti this evening. There will be no moon tonight given it sets at about 2pm this afternoon, so it should be a good, clear, dark sky. I am going to try for a star-trail image with one camera and set one of the cameras up with the intervalometer set at 40 second intervals making 30 second exposures at perhaps f5.6. Experimentation required! Given the CA issues I experienced recently, I plan to avoid wide open apertures. A couple of years ago I took some Perseid meteor shower photographs so I will take a look at the image data from them and use that as a guide. This is one I caught of a Perseid meteor in August 2009, well, I thought it was a couple of years ago!!! Time flies when you are enjoying yourself... Nikon D200, Nikkor 50mm f1.4 @ f1.8, 25sec, ISO 200 GPS 54°14'10" N 3°8'4" W 
____________________ Robert. |
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| Posted: Tue Dec 8th, 2015 16:35 |
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2nd Post |
jk
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Very nice Robert. Are the streaky bits clouds? For astrophotography the rule seems to be lens wide open (f4 or adjust ISO), 25 secs, ISO adjusted to get correct exposue but usually ISO200-3200.
____________________ Still learning after all these years! https://nikondslr.uk/gallery_view.php?user=2&folderid=none |
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| Posted: Tue Dec 8th, 2015 21:13 |
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3rd Post |
Robert
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Thanks JK, yes the streaky bit are clouds. I have just got in, I packed up about 2 am, it's pretty cold, 5ºC or thereabouts, ran out of coffee and batteries... More about the batteries anon... I took 750 exposures with two bodies, I heve just run through them quickly and I don't appear to have captured one meteor.  In at least 50% of the images the sky was obscured by cloud, I saw two meteors with the naked eye in four hours but the cameras don't appear to have caught any.Off to bed, a bit tired and cold.
____________________ Robert. |
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| Posted: Wed Dec 9th, 2015 04:35 |
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4th Post |
Robert
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Having gone through the images more carefully I have found one with a trace of a Meteor, I think! Although it might be a satellite but I don't know how to tell the difference. Except this trail seems to be of the same intensity throughout it's length... Having dumped all the heavy cloud images I am only left with 198 images which I will whittle down considerably further, but I may make a time lapse from some of it, just to develop the technique, there is no particular interest in these images. 
____________________ Robert. |
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| Posted: Wed Dec 9th, 2015 10:24 |
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5th Post |
Eric
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Robert wrote:Having gone through the images more carefully I have found one with a trace of a Meteor, I think! Although it might be a satellite but I don't know how to tell the difference. Except this trail seems to be of the same intensity throughout it's length... Satellites don't tend to burn out and disappear. 
____________________ Eric |
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| Posted: Wed Dec 9th, 2015 11:41 |
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6th Post |
jk
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Yes I agree with Eric that is a meteor streak as it burns out. A satellite is very hot on re-entry but then it goes black. It is much more defined.
____________________ Still learning after all these years! https://nikondslr.uk/gallery_view.php?user=2&folderid=none |
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| Posted: Wed Dec 9th, 2015 14:09 |
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7th Post |
Eric
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jk wrote:Yes I agree with Eric that is a meteor streak as it burns out. I meant, satellites tend to stay up there....hopefully
____________________ Eric |
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| Posted: Wed Dec 9th, 2015 15:24 |
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8th Post |
Robert
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Yes, agreed! But if the satellite was at the position of the beginning of the streak at the start of the exposure and it travelled the distance of the length of the streak in 4 seconds, it could be a satellite... If it were a plane the streak would be stop-start, like dashes, as the navigation lights flashed. In most photographs I have seen of meteors the intensity of the streak becomes greater as the meteor enters the atmosphere and then disappears very quickly, so the intense part is near the end of the streak. But some are like mine, fairly constant intensity, so some doubt exists, in my mind anyway. Another factor which leans towards a meteor is the two adjacent images have no sign of the streak, the intervalometer was set at 20 seconds start to start of each exposure, so there would have been 16 seconds gap between exposures, very roughly I estimate just looking at the full image that there should have been a trace on at least the previous exposure and possibly the one before that too as the bright object approached. The two meteor streaks I SAW, were quite long and the intensity grew as the meteors entered the Earths atmosphere, then they quickly expired. Anyway, not a very exciting result from 4 hours of messing about in the dark and getting pretty cold but it was great fun doing it and the results aren't everything. It's given me a little more experience and hopefully when I do get a good night with plentiful meteors and a clear sky I will be able to make some nice pictures. It takes quite a bit of experimentation to get the settings right and I am not convinced they were perfect last night. This was my first sorti with the D300s, I am hugely impressed and if the D3 is better, which I think it has to be, if only because of the FX sensor, I can't wait for that day. I tried ISO 3,200 but it was a bit too noisy, so I backed off to ISO 1,600 which gave a cleaner image, while retaining reasonable speed. I ran the D200 alongside but by comparison it was a disaster. ISO 400 is the realistic maximum for a reasonably clean image, I was needing 30 second exposures at 45 second intervals (1 exposure every 45 seconds) to give it time to process and save each image. The battery life was terrible, I used four batteries to take 163 NEF's while the D300s took 585 NEF's and would probably have taken at least another 200 on just one battery, it is indicating more than half of the capacity remaining. None of my batteries are prone to a particularly short capacity and I don't believe the one I used in the D300s was in any way different. All the batteries were fully charged before I left home. I assume the poor battery performance was as a result of the 30 second exposures and the processing for noise reduction in camera which was far slower than the D300s. I could have upped the number of exposures per minute from the D300s if I wished, probably to 6 per minute but I didn't want so many exposures, or perhaps I did? LOL The only external difference between the two cameras was I had the Nikon ML-3 remote receiver plugged into the ten pin socket, but it was turned off, so it shouldn't have affected the battery life, should it?
____________________ Robert. |
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| Posted: Thu Dec 10th, 2015 02:01 |
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9th Post |
jk
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Sounds like you are falling out of love with your D200 and have a new mistress in the D300S! The D300 and D300S are junior versions of the D3 and D3S respectively.
____________________ Still learning after all these years! https://nikondslr.uk/gallery_view.php?user=2&folderid=none |
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| Posted: Thu Dec 10th, 2015 03:20 |
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10th Post |
Robert
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In good conditions the D200 has been fine for my needs. The resolution is more than adequate and the images I have obtained with it have been perfectly satisfying but for stuff which is much more demanding like night time photography, which I haven't really been interested in before it has always been acknowledged the early cameras, like the D1 and D2xx cameras lacked the capacity to produce the goods. To my mind we are moving into new photographic territory here, these fairly clean and detailed images in almost complete darkness would never have been possible in the days of film, or not easily. To some degree this is why I have not had much interest in photography in poor light, my mind has always been attuned to the idea that you only take good photographs in GOOD light. Fifty odd years of conditioning takes a little effort to overcome and I will still try to make good light photographs. Whether the D300s will produce better images of flowers in good conditions remains to be seen but I don't expect to feel the need to re-take many, if any of my botanic photographs. It may enable me to take some which I have struggled with because they are under a heavy canopy, in the short dull days of the winter months like some of the Rhododendrons at Muncaster. I definitely want to revisit one particular bush which has up to now defeated all my attempts to get good images of it's flowers, although I think it might take the D3 to conquer that one! :thumbsup: Considering I have never used a D300 before, I managed quite easily in almost total darkness, to work the back buttons to access the menu and display buttons although perhaps some tactile difference would be welcome to differentiate the two display zoom buttons which would help when working by feel. A single pip on the zoom in button and multiple pips on the zoom out.
____________________ Robert. |
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