I went out on Sunday night with a friend and we took a few photos with my new camera (Sony a6000). Took enough photos to play around with that software Steve mentioned. Also attempted a few photos of the comet. For most of what I did I just used the regular lens, 16-50 set at 16mm. We couldn't discern the comet with the naked eyes, only when we took a photo and zoomed in on the screen did we know we had it. I think the moon was a bit closer and a bit brighter than would have been ideal.
Here is one of the times I captured the comet.
That was a 30" exposure (hence the star movement), f3.5, iso 4000.
Here is a link to a larger version without the inset:
https://plus.google.com/photos/+BryanSa ... 5627140847My friend (Rob of Eclipse Photography & Framing) was much more dedicated. He worked hard to center the comet in frame then zoomed in and progressed through 3 lenses until he was zoomed all the way in with a 300mm(?) lens. I haven't seen his results yet, but it took him about an hour to get the final shot.
That snapshot was taken with my point & shoot since while Rob worked on getting that shot of the comet, I set the camera up to take a series of 30" shots so that I could play with the StarStax software Steve mentioned. I thought I had taken 50 or so shots, but it turned out to have been 10. So, I guess I better figure out better how to set my camera and remote so that it's doing what I think it's doing.
It was a warm night (around 0C) but darned windy. That wind shook my camera the tiniest amount and made it feel a lot colder than it was. I learned a few things about photography in general and about using my camera, specifically. But I still have a lot more playing around with it before I can make it do what I want.
We had parked ourselves along the North Saskatchewan River NW of Saskatoon about 40km; before the sun went completely down we used the valley in our shots.
I might try HDR to get this image to look closer to how it did in person. It was a really nice spot and we'll likely head out there again, even just to snowshoe (if we get more snow).
We did have just a hint of northern lights while we were out, and the camera did a better job of picking that up than my eyes did.
Cheers,
Bryan