I used to work with a nose-to-the-grindstone guy who complained that "those darn holidays" were interfering with him getting his work done. Maybe he was joking; we weren't sure. Last night, I tried to shoot the Draconid meteor shower and those darn Northern Lights interfered. My plan was to shoot 90-second exposures over seven hours and stack them. The result would be a star trails image with streaks of meteors running through it. It was doomed to fail as the intervalometer wasn't retriggering in a second, so there is a 90-second gap between all the images. Just for fun, I did a quick stack in StarStaX and it turned out better than I thought. Without the gaps, maybe it would have been interesting, but there are no meteor trails evident. A suspected meteor trail (image #2) does not even show up in the stacked image (#4) as it was in the lower right of the frame where the Lights were the brightest.
I'll try again tonight with (a) shorter exposure time of 25 seconds rather than 90, (b) the full-frame 5D rather than the 1.3x crop 1D, and (c) pointing more directly north rather than northwest. If nothing else, I will end up with another star trails image.
And these are my first Northern Lights images. I did not see them visually, but that 14mm f/2.8 gathers in a lot of light in 90 seconds.
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