Tracker - The Garage Sessions (a DIY post)

1200 Tracker

Yup, here are the photos direct from Bill's garage of the Great Tracker Caper which  I am happy to report, seems to be working pretty well!  Hopefully more on that from Bill soon!

In other news, the nice folks over at DIY Photography noticed some of my moon shots on Flickr and asked me to write a quick tutorial about them, so I did! You can find it here.

Into the Stella Valles rode the 600

Quite a while ago I posted a technique on eliminating/reducing star trails in your night shots. And now I have found another, perhaps easier way to make this calculation, at least for safety. This is called the "Rule of 600".

Basically you take your true lens focal length (on a 2/3 sensor you multiply by 1.6, eg 18mm x 1.6 = 28.8mm) and then divide 600 by that focal length .. this will return you the longest exposure that is possible for any given focal length lens, without the stars streaking.

So, using the 18mm Lens, that would return 600/28.8 = 20.833 seconds before trails show up.