Zane asked me to do a 1 hour exposure at school today, so I figured i'd give it a go. I did a few test shots to focus, then left it on for 15 minutes to check if I had found the south celestial pole (top left of image below). Well I had but from it I figured there was no point shooting for an hour, as it'd be too bright, and it just wouldn't look nice with all the light pollution in the city interfering.
I might try going up the coast to Wainui, out to Gray's bush, or even just up Riverside Road for a while this weekend to see if I can get a longer exposure with less light from town. Be able to set up a nice scene too, with the hills in the background or something (without the tree, the shot would be pretty bland).
But man, what a difference shooting in .RAW format makes. It means the camera does no post processing itself (setting sharpness/brightness/saturation/white balance/etc), and lets me tinker around afterwards. The only downside to .RAW is that each shot is around 10mb, meaning I can take only a fifth of what I could with jpeg alone (But I can still shoot 500 RAW images, thanks to a 4GB and 1GB stick :3).
![[Image: stars.jpg]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v47/Timo12/stars.jpg)
943 seconds (15 minutes 43 seconds), f/3.5, ISO 100. Added a bit of blur to an over layed duplicate to make the tree a bit softer, since it was windy.