Night Moves

The alarm beeped and I reached over to turn it off. Dang thing.

What did it go off for? Who set that alarm for 1:30 am? Oh. I did.
I was going to get up and see where the Milky Way was and I'd set up my camera to try a shot of the night sky.

I had pre-focused my Nikon D5200 just before sunset and had it locked on infinity in hopes that using the 35mm prime lens would give me enough sky to capture some stars.

I shot this at a 20 second exposure with an f stop on the lens of 1.8 and an ISO of 100.
What I saw on my screen afterwards was nearly totally black.

I took another shot on the other side of the house looking north.

I could see a bit more of the stars on my screen. But I wasn't happy with it.
So I changed up the settings and did some light painting.

I used a LED flashlight for about one second on this shot, just clicked on and off quickly.
I could see this on the monitor.

So I tried another experiment. I wanted to take a shot of the porch.
Note to self. Once I took the camera off from the infinity setting and used the Auto focus to take a shot of the skull, the camera would not focus for me. I even tried manual focus.

Frustrated, I set the exposure to 10 seconds and then flipped the little flashlight I had across the porch...

Early this morning the alarm went off at 1:30 again. I sighed and shut it off. I shut my eyes and soon I was wide awake. I glanced up through the window and the stars were bright. The weather folks were wrong!

I grabbed the camera. I thought I'd set it up properly.
However...

I hadn't. The focus was off and I didn't know that until I opened the photos later this morning.
However, I do know where the Milky Way is around 2am now.
And have an idea of where to get shots of it from the yard.

So I will set things up again for another try tonight.

Settings for these shots were 20 seconds, f 1.8 [35mm lens], 640 ISO and 800 ISO.

Tonight I will set up the 35mm lens again and set up the 18-55mm lens to see if I can't get a wider angle.

My husband thinks I am certifiably crazy.

I say, I need to keep experimenting and challenging myself.