The Big Dipper

Heading down to Cannon Beach one afternoon to catch the sunset, I was disappointed by the absolutely cloudless sky. But soon after the sun went down, the Big Dipper emerged like some kind of celestial neon sign. It was incredibly prominent above Haystack Rock. A rising tide gave me some foreground interest and a curve to lend some depth to what could have been a very flat image.

There is some noise due to shooting at ISO 400 for 143 seconds and pushing the exposure up by 1 stop in the raw converter. Also, I should have masked out the edges of the rocks when I sharpened to prevent the halos...

Has anybody attempted long exposure star trails with a digital? I'm curious to find how long an exposure I can get on one battery with my 20D (including the equal length dark frame exposure for noise reduction..)

This is really nice, Mike.. can't answer your question though - I've never tried it..

Noise and "hot pixels" become a problem after a while. Even with the best digitals you can't do a 7-hour exposure like you could on Provia 100 or 400 and create big star spirals. I've done exposures up to 45 minutes with my 5D. The noise reduction feature makes little difference IMO. I get plenty of hot pixels and a bit of noise at that exposure lenth and it takes a while to clean up. I've done 10 minute exposures with only very minor problems. I like this shot quite a bit Mike.

This way cool, MIke! My only nit would be that the waterline on the right is a bit tight to the edge of the frame.

Great comp with the big sky and celestial display. Very spacey scene and lighting.
Harald

This image would make me very happy. I was also at the coast (Ecola) a couple weeks back for a sunset and got to watch a cloudless one (though I personally believe no sunset I get to watch is a bad one). But I did not come back with anything that looked this nice.

If you'd like a nit, it looks like your horizon might tilt a little bit to the right, but it is a very little bit.

-Brett

Brett,
Other than the slight tilt of the horizon, this shot is way cool.

I really like this, Mike! I envy you, my 300D can't reliably produce these shots.

Kevin

wow that's really cool. I like how the water seems to have a border around it.

All, Thanks so much for your comments. By the way, two women walked right throught the frame as I had the shutter open on this exposure. Marc, I'm looking forward to trying a few star trail shots one of these weekends--I've seen some references to software to stack a series of images at shorter exposures (~30 sec?) taken over a period of time. I'm guessing this might be more suited to digital star trails... Thanks for sharing your experiences. I'm just lucky this one turned out pretty well considering that it was my first try at a bulb exposure...