A noisy night

For once we had a clear night and you could actually see some stars. Right out the back porch was the big dipper, or at least a few pieces of it as far as I could tell. So I set up shop, and a few planes flew by. All the ambient light from the complex and the sourrounding cities made the camera want to take pics no longer than 2 seconds or so. At that speed the stars weren't bright enough to show up at all. So I tried several at 10 and 15 seconds. 60 was way too long so there was no way I was going to get any star rotation. They looked great on the camera. But it turns out the camera was right, the ambient light was just too bright, there was no ways the stars could compete with it. The end result was really just a bunch of noise. But with a bit of touch up a lot of the noise is gone and you can at least see a faint resemblence of a few stars, and the plane tracks are still kind of cool I think.

These 2 are the best plane tracks:

This one I retouched so you can actually see a couple stars:

This is the kind of ambient light I am dealing with.

Turns out I can be really noisy too.

I am sure this will work much better out west.......

-sam