Big Bear Star Trails

Big Bear Star Trails, originally uploaded by billaday.

I've been wanting to do another star trails photo for a while. I failed last night, so I did some homework. Here's what I did/learned:
• I took 33 photos
• total exposure time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
• each photo was about 3 minutes long
• f/3.5 (which was counter-intuitive, but that's what everyone else does. The stars are brighter with a wider aperture.)
• ISO 200 (that's the lowest my dSLR gets)
• manual focus (on the house at the bottom)
• Photoshop: changed layer properties to Lighten, aligned photos (barely at all), masked out top right corner (it was purplish)

This will officially be my earliest photo-a-day blog posting. It's 3:32 am. I had to wonderful idea to start at 1:00 am with this shot.

Day 123