First Star Trail Attempt

First Star Trail Attempt
Originally uploaded by Christopher M.J. Tsorotes

Here's a great demonstrationn of how beginners can take pictures of star trails with no special astronomy equipment::

To achieve this photo I used the following:
My K7

No tripod (I just sat the camera on the ledge)

16 shots in raw plus one dark frame (turned off slow frame NR, then turned it back off tor the dark frame)

ISO 500
f6.3 (Pentax DA16-45)
30" Shutter
Cable Release (I found interval timer inbuilt didn't work properly for some strange reason, I think because of the buffer limits)

Photoshop CS4
Lightroom (to process the raws)
Star Trails (this app really suprised me, its amazing)
Vertus fluid mask

Believe it or not I used absolutely no noise reduction software.

Clever stuff on the astronomy for beginners group.