I spent the night of July 5 testing CCD gear. I wanted to come home with more than some test frames so I set up the Canon with an interval timer and took 1hr 45min worth of images. I started the exposures shortly after dusk at 9:30pm as the evening twilight gave way to darkness.
You can see many planes on their approach to SFO and a couple entering the frame from the right (headed south down the Pacific coast) on their way to destinations unknown. Odd to think that each brief streak of light is a aluminum tube holding a hundred or more people. Also visible are a couple meteors and some high clouds which briefly threatened to make it a short evening. I also think there is a geostationary satellite in the mix. It's a bit hard impossible to make it out in the postage stamp sized inline version that blogger provides. You can double click on the video to see it at YouTube (HD even) but I'm also disappointed quality of the playback there. It is very smooth in native playback on my laptop ... after upload to YouTube the playback is annoyingly jerky. I'll have figure this one out.
In order to pan the field I use my Astrotrac tangent drive mounted horizontally and in "Southern Hemisphere" mode. This causes the camera to pan opposite the earths rotation so I can get a very slow pan. You will notice near the end - the panning stopped when the batteries died.
Montebello Milky Way
Taken at Montebello Open Space, CA July 5, 2011
Canon T2i (stock), Canon EF 24mm f/1.4L II USM @ f/2.8 Manfrotto Tripod with Astrotrac mounted horizontal for pannning
398 10sec exposures @ ISO1600, 5sec interval
no calibration, color adjusted in Pixinsight Timelapse generated in QuickTime Player 7
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