I got up just before my alarm rang this morning. I got up and looked around the eastern sky and tried to see the comet with the binoculars. I couldn’t see much of anything where I was looking. Later after a shower, I hooked up the camera and tried to get a few shots of the sky in order to look at later. It seems that the files were exposed to much and since I was using the 600mm lens the star trails were getting long with the 15-20 sec exposure durations. I never got a picture of the comet partially due to the fact I think I was looking a little too far to the south of the north side of the constellation of Aquila. I’m going to try again tomorrow, but this time I’ll use only the 240 mm and try to get shots with less star trails. Problem is that I really need to get up at about 5:00am and be ready to check things out about 5:30 or so.
I set the ISO speed to 1600, enabled the long exposure shutter delay, the long exposure NR and the High ISO NR. I took most of the shots this morning with an exposure of 15 seconds. I varied the apertures from f/22 to f/5.6 (can’t get any lower with the 2x converter). I think I’ll need to try 1-5 second exposures tomorrow and this maybe OK with the f/5.6 or I can possibly take off the 2x converter and move down to f/2.8. I think I’ll do some experimenting this evening after it gets dark. Also, the star trails were about twice as big at 600mm as they were at 240mm. I’ll also be using the computer to capture the images since it will allow quicker shots and I’ll be able to see how they look several seconds after I take them.
600mm