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Star Streak Tutorial
shoot). It also can be set to calculate the events for past/future dates. A must for any star geek. I'm on my
third one in 10 years now.
-- Bruce Benson, March 26, 1999
To avoid fogging your lenses, and to make a more overall enjoyable experience when photographing
stars, make yourself comfortable. A cheap pup tent of sufficient height can house your expensive tripod,
telescope, camera, your equipment, and you. Setup your tripod in the tent and point the camera out the
main opening. If you shop around in a good camping store, you'll be able to find a tent that has a large
enough opening for you to capture most scenes and leave enough room for you to pass by. (On very cold
or windy nights, cut a small flap in the side or top of the tent, point the camera in that direction, and zip
everything inside. Your tripod might end up just 1 meter off the ground, or you may need to never enter
the tent while filming so as not to disturb the tripod.) You also might want to cut a large hole or flap in
the floor of the tent so your tripod can rest on the earth rather than fabric. Now, a small non-combustible
heat source placed in the tent will keep the temperature warm enough to prevent fogging. Voila! Your
camera is safe(r) from wind, cold, and rain. Plus, you can always sleep in it!
-- Billy Newsom, April 2, 1999
I got an idea from Phil's comment about batteries dying mid-exposure during star trail photography. If
you're interested in doing it, next time you get a low-bat light on one of your cameras, immediately take
out the battery and save it to open the shutter on a star trail picture. So, next time you're going to shoot
the stars, remove your current battery, insert an almost-dead one to open the shutter, and, to close the
shutter in the morning, reinsert the original battery. Unless I'm overlooking something important, that
should help.
-- David Marhadoe, November 14, 1999
It is worth mentioning that the Canon EOS 3 (with its unique shutter system) doesn't exhaust the battery
when performing bulb exposures to anything like the extent of the EOS 5, and other electronic SLRs no
doubt. I wish I had one! See http://www.canon-europa.com/Eos/ and look under innovations/rotary
magnet shutter.
-- Michael Wells, December 27, 1999
For those who don't have a lot of money to spend on a camera body with a manual bulb setting, consider
purchasing an old Minolta SR-T body with 50mm, 55mm, or 58mm standard lens. There are hundreds if
not thousands of these available on the used market at any given time, and you can usually get them
complete for under $140 (except the all-black models, as they're more collectible).
They sell for less nowadays due to the fact that the mercury batteries they used are getting harder and
harder to find. They're an even better deal if the meter is inoperable -- what do you care, you're not using
the meter anyway! I personally recommend the SR-T 101: 1-1/1000 shutter, self-timer, DOF preview,
http://www.photo.net/astro/star-streak (5 of 9)7/3/2005 2:15:29 AM