Guess what these are:

If you guessed “stars,” then give yourself a pat on the back! I took my 500mm lens, focused it to infinity, aimed it at a bright star, and locked down my remote shutter release for about 9 minutes. The bright trail near the center is the one I aimed for, but there are a lot of fainter stars around it that I didn’t see with my eyes. The variety of colors the camera picked up is also interesting, since most stars look white from here.

Sadly, I learned my camera isn’t the best for long exposures in the dark. DSLRs, and Nikons especially, apparently have a problem with their internal electronics heating up during long exposures and causing blobs of noise to appear in the image. You can see what it looks like here. I’ve cropped the offending bits out of the picture above, but it reduces my usable frame area by about 30%. Basically, my trusty D80 isn’t so great for astrophotography.

Which means on top of the equatorial mount, I’d probably need to get some sort of cooled CCD system to take really awesome deep space shots. Oh yeah, and I’d need a good telescope.

I think I’ll stick to star trails for now.