Shooting for the stars, but i dont know how!?

[HitenNainaney]

Hey Everyone,

With the meteor shower coming in tonight, i've got all bags and beverages packed & set to go shoot a couple of timelapses for the shower.

I've done quite a few timelapses before, but all within the city or during lit hours.

This is infact the first time i'm going to do one in the dark.

The biggest challenge i'm having is to figure out how i should focus my lenses to infinity.

I've got the AF-S Nikkor 35mm 1.8g which i plan on using tonight. And probably try the Sigma 10-20 1:3.5.

The Sigma does have an infinity focus symbol but the 35mm 1.8 doesnt.

I've read online that with lenses such as the 35mm 1.8, you need to take it all the way back and the a little bit forwards again.

How accurate is that information ?

Is there any other way to manually focus to infinity ??

Thanks everyone!

Cheers!
Hiten Nainaney

 

[KmH]

For all intents and purposes if something a mile or more away is in focus the lens will be at infinity focus.

With an infinity symbol you still likely would need to experiment a bit to determine exactly where infinity focus is.
You could experiment with the 35 mm f/1.8 in daylight and mark where infinity focus is for your lens.

 

[bobandcar]

Can I get info about this shower? I may have to make a drive to the country

 

[HitenNainaney]

http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/where-and-how-to-view-this-weeks-meteor-shower/


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[pgriz]

Can I get info about this shower? I may have to make a drive to the country

I have a thread on it here: http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/...maybe-terrific-maybe-dud-new-shower-look.html

 

[TCampbell]

Hiten,

If you are actually home in UAE this may be bad for you. This particular meteor shower is expected to have a short duration. It "peaks" at about 7am universal time -- but that would be 11am (daytime) for you at UTC +4. I'm in the US Eastern timezone (UTC -4) so the meteor shower peaks at 3am.

Some meteor showers are the results of comets that dispersed fairly wide trails and while one night might the "peak" (lasting most of the night) you can get meteors days before and after that peak... sometimes even a few weeks. This comet, however, is believed to have a fairly narrow trail of dust and the believe is that it will last only a few hours.

If you follow the link to Paul's thread, there's a graph that shows the "guess" as to the number of meteors per hour that we may be getting. Also notice that just a few hours either before or after the peak have the graph trailing to zero activity.

The quantity per hour is really just a guess... Earth has never passed through this particular trail of dust before and observations of the comet did not reveal a lot of dust being spewed out. All astronomers know is that it is a narrow trail (it won't be a long lasting event... it'll be just a few hours from start to finish) and will peak during the middle of the night for those in North America.

Not just any place in North America is good... besides needing a clear sky, you need the right latitude. Too far north and since the northern pole is currently tipped toward the sun it won't get dark enough. Too far south and you won't be able to see the radiant point in Camelopardalis (although strictly speaking meteors can be seen anywhere in the sky... it's just that they will seem to originate from this point.)

Meanwhile back to your question about the photography...

You want the WIDEST angle lens you've got... ditch the 35mm... you want to use that Sigma 10-20mm... at the 10mm focal length. You want to capture the widest possible section of sky possible. You want to focus the camera to "infinity" as carefully as possible. This will need to be done manually as the camera will not be able to autofocus on the stars. It could auto-focus on the moon... but the moon would ruin the meteor showers (the moon will not rise until the meteor shower is nearly finished.)

If you set the camera to take 30 second exposures, but it on "continuous" shooting mode, and lock the shutter button down (a wired shutter release usually has a "lock" switch on it) then you can use this to tell the camera to continuously capture exposures in hopes of getting something good. It's not as if we know when meteor streak is about to appear so really you've just got to keep shooting and hoping for them.

 

[IzzieK]

Thanks Tim...really appreciate your help here too.

Hiten,

If you are actually home in UAE this may be bad for you. This particular meteor shower is expected to have a short duration. It "peaks" at about 7am universal time -- but that would be 11am (daytime) for you at UTC +4. I'm in the US Eastern timezone (UTC -4) so the meteor shower peaks at 3am.

Some meteor showers are the results of comets that dispersed fairly wide trails and while one night might the "peak" (lasting most of the night) you can get meteors days before and after that peak... sometimes even a few weeks. This comet, however, is believed to have a fairly narrow trail of dust and the believe is that it will last only a few hours.

If you follow the link to Paul's thread, there's a graph that shows the "guess" as to the number of meteors per hour that we may be getting. Also notice that just a few hours either before or after the peak have the graph trailing to zero activity.

The quantity per hour is really just a guess... Earth has never passed through this particular trail of dust before and observations of the comet did not reveal a lot of dust being spewed out. All astronomers know is that it is a narrow trail (it won't be a long lasting event... it'll be just a few hours from start to finish) and will peak during the middle of the night for those in North America.

Not just any place in North America is good... besides needing a clear sky, you need the right latitude. Too far north and since the northern pole is currently tipped toward the sun it won't get dark enough. Too far south and you won't be able to see the radiant point in Camelopardalis (although strictly speaking meteors can be seen anywhere in the sky... it's just that they will seem to originate from this point.)

Meanwhile back to your question about the photography...

You want the WIDEST angle lens you've got... ditch the 35mm... you want to use that Sigma 10-20mm... at the 10mm focal length. You want to capture the widest possible section of sky possible. You want to focus the camera to "infinity" as carefully as possible. This will need to be done manually as the camera will not be able to autofocus on the stars. It could auto-focus on the moon... but the moon would ruin the meteor showers (the moon will not rise until the meteor shower is nearly finished.)

If you set the camera to take 30 second exposures, but it on "continuous" shooting mode, and lock the shutter button down (a wired shutter release usually has a "lock" switch on it) then you can use this to tell the camera to continuously capture exposures in hopes of getting something good. It's not as if we know when meteor streak is about to appear so really you've just got to keep shooting and hoping for them.

 

[HitenNainaney]

Hiten,

If you are actually home in UAE this may be bad for you. This particular meteor shower is expected to have a short duration. It "peaks" at about 7am universal time -- but that would be 11am (daytime) for you at UTC +4. I'm in the US Eastern timezone (UTC -4) so the meteor shower peaks at 3am.

Some meteor showers are the results of comets that dispersed fairly wide trails and while one night might the "peak" (lasting most of the night) you can get meteors days before and after that peak... sometimes even a few weeks. This comet, however, is believed to have a fairly narrow trail of dust and the believe is that it will last only a few hours.

If you follow the link to Paul's thread, there's a graph that shows the "guess" as to the number of meteors per hour that we may be getting. Also notice that just a few hours either before or after the peak have the graph trailing to zero activity.

The quantity per hour is really just a guess... Earth has never passed through this particular trail of dust before and observations of the comet did not reveal a lot of dust being spewed out. All astronomers know is that it is a narrow trail (it won't be a long lasting event... it'll be just a few hours from start to finish) and will peak during the middle of the night for those in North America.

Not just any place in North America is good... besides needing a clear sky, you need the right latitude. Too far north and since the northern pole is currently tipped toward the sun it won't get dark enough. Too far south and you won't be able to see the radiant point in Camelopardalis (although strictly speaking meteors can be seen anywhere in the sky... it's just that they will seem to originate from this point.)

Meanwhile back to your question about the photography...

You want the WIDEST angle lens you've got... ditch the 35mm... you want to use that Sigma 10-20mm... at the 10mm focal length. You want to capture the widest possible section of sky possible. You want to focus the camera to "infinity" as carefully as possible. This will need to be done manually as the camera will not be able to autofocus on the stars. It could auto-focus on the moon... but the moon would ruin the meteor showers (the moon will not rise until the meteor shower is nearly finished.)

If you set the camera to take 30 second exposures, but it on "continuous" shooting mode, and lock the shutter button down (a wired shutter release usually has a "lock" switch on it) then you can use this to tell the camera to continuously capture exposures in hopes of getting something good. It's not as if we know when meteor streak is about to appear so really you've just got to keep shooting and hoping for them.

Hey Tim,

Thanks for that in depth explanation.

Just got back home from the trip and I have to say, you were right about almost everything.

Drove 2 hours out of the city and 2 hours back.

Locating the constellation was the easy bit, bottom left of Polaris.

Set my camera up, I did ditch the 35mm after looking at the surroundings, and more over it'd be useless for astrophotography, specially on a cropped sensor.

So I put on the 10-20, at 10mm set the camera for shooting 30second exposures, but just past 3am UAE time the moon along with Venus started rising high up, illuminating what little was visible.

By the end of it I just called it quits on pictures and just stated up to enjoy the very faint show.

Sun started showing up at 4:45 am, so just packed up and left.

Quite bummed about it but hey, the wife and I did enjoy being out of the city

So no regrets

Thanks once again fellas!


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