Star Trails in Alabama
While visiting my family this past Thanksgiving I decided to set-up the camera to experiment with capturing some of the amazing stars visible on the family farm. My family has a farm in rural Alabama about 20 minutes outside of Montgomery. It has been in the family since the early 70s when my grandfather had cattle on it and grew soybeans and cotton. Now my youngest brother raises tilapia in a pond he built about 17 years ago.
So with a Canon 60D and the Sigma 18-35mm 1.8 lens everyone is raving about, I chose a few different angles across the farm. My exposures were typically 800 iso for 15 seconds at about f3.5 with 5 seconds between each exposure. During the process I settled on shooting 240 frames for 10 second at 24fps.
At the time there was a waxing moon that was at crescent the first night and half by the final night. One thing I noticed was the big difference between when the moon was up and shots taken after it went down. That is most noticeable in the shot across the pond where the sky turns from blue to black during the exposure. I set the timer on the intervalometer to start that exposures about 30 minutes before the moon set at 11:45.
Dew set in during the last exposure and fogged the lens. But it looks pretty cool.
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