Long Exposure Photography

On a recent trip to Catalina Island, I brought a Canon camera that I had prepared with alternative firmware from the CHDK project. This firmware opens up more of the capabilities of the firmware such as saving pictures in the RAW image format, scripting, and very long exposures. It only supports certain Canon cameras.

Using a small tripod and long exposures of about 2 minutes, I captured the following images of the night sky. This was a first time experiment, but the results were very interesting.

The red streak in the lower right is the tail light of a passing car. The dotted line through the center of the image is likely a passing airplane.

To the naked eye, the trees and bushes were very dimly lit. The hills were black.

You can definitely see some structure of the Milky Way.

In these images, you can see the stars are elongated, showing the earth's movement over the exposure time.

The building lights cast an interesting glow.