Star Trails

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Skiver

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So I decided to give this a try last night, set my camera up in the house pointing out the back window just to test this out and unfortunately it didn't work like I expected.

I used the inbuilt interval mode, set it to take 200, 30 second exposures and when I came down in the morning unfortunately it only took 12 exposures which I have and can reproduce easily.

The Camera is setup to shoot in RAW, completely in manual mode with manual focus so i'm not sure what I am missing here.

Thanks in advance for any help!
 
What happened?

Battery failure?
Ran out of memory?
Interfering family member? (If i'd done this before getting my own place, my father would almost certainly have turned the camera off for wasting electricity)

Will it do more than the 12 if you set the timer to much shorter intervals?

I didn't know the D5100 did intervals internally btw, I use an external timer/remote on my D90.
 
As far as I can see no errors what so ever!

The battery still had way over two thirds, the memory card claims it could store another 250 + photo's

Nope no family members (i was the last to go to bed and first up in the morning)

I did have a play around last night, sat it on my lap and set it off again and sure enough it got to 12 and seemed to stop.

I tried extending the interval timer (after i read something) to 32 seconds, 30 second exposure + 2 second between. and it must have taken easily 30 shots before I cancelled it but it was waiting approx 32 seconds between each shot so that certainly didn't seem like it was the correct way to do it.

Could it be that the memory card just can't handle a 30 second exposure every 2 seconds? I would have expected it to just maybe take a little longer than 2 seconds before the next one if that was the case but it literally just seems to stop.
 
What you might be doing is filling the buffer, your not giving the camera enough time to process the image before taking the next one. Especially if LENR is turned on?

I would try 30s or 60s gaps between shots, see what happens.
 
when I do star trails I don't even bother with an intervalometer I just use a normal cable release and lock the button down.

I turn off the long exposer noise reduction set the camera to continuos hight speed and set the camera to 30 second exposure and adjust the f number something around f2.8 or if your lens wont go that low 4.5 or 5 but you need to play around with this. ISO normally around 800 or more I have shot as high as 3200 with a fast lents to freeze the stars. As for memory some cards have a slower write rate which can slow down the performance worth spending a bit more for higher speed ones.
 
Try using a cable release and locking the shutter button, with the camera set to continuous shooting. I did this instead of using the interval timer with reasonable results.
 
Hmm ok, I have play around with this and last attempt last night i had the gap in between shots at 10 seconds and only managed 50 shots before it gave up.

looks like I need to one of the above methods as I think 10 seconds already would ruin any attempt at getting a decent result.
 
a 10 second gap is way to much you will end up with a dotted line the the technique suggested by karl and my self is a tried, tested proven way of doing this. it is worth sitting with your kit while Its running there is one other option if you know that its going to be a dry clear night with no dew you can set the camera to bulb lock the shutter button on for a constant hour or 2 hour exposure
 
A little bit of research suggests that the D5100 is capable of taking 999 photos with it's intervolmetre so that dosn't appear to be the issue, what was the timings of the 12 exposures were they shot 1 after the other or was there a significant gap between exposure...I guess what I'm asking here is were all the exposures from the first 6 minutes from when your first fired the camera/set it off???
 
Skiver said:
As far as I can see no errors what so ever!

The battery still had way over two thirds, the memory card claims it could store another 250 + photo's

Nope no family members (i was the last to go to bed and first up in the morning)

I did have a play around last night, sat it on my lap and set it off again and sure enough it got to 12 and seemed to stop.

I tried extending the interval timer (after i read something) to 32 seconds, 30 second exposure + 2 second between. and it must have taken easily 30 shots before I cancelled it but it was waiting approx 32 seconds between each shot so that certainly didn't seem like it was the correct way to do it.

Could it be that the memory card just can't handle a 30 second exposure every 2 seconds? I would have expected it to just maybe take a little longer than 2 seconds before the next one if that was the case but it literally just seems to stop.
Click to expand...

Did you turn off the long exposure noise reduction as suggested? What you describe here suggests it's being left on. This doubles the length of each shot and, I believe, can increase the processing time- perhaps getting to a point where the camera cannot take another shot as it's still processing the last one.
 
Sound like the LENR is on. The interval is the TOTAL time ie exposure time and a bit extra (say, 2 seconds). I made the same mistake in just puitting 2 seconds and eventually the camera gets confused and stops taking shots. You could always use a wired cable locked on and just delete the last exposure if you happen to move the camera when unlocking the remote. Don't forget to switch the camera to continuous mode though.
JohnyT
 
Sorry forgot to mention that LENR is actually off.

I did try setting it at 32 seconds (30 second exposure + 2 seconds interval) but it seemed to wait 32 seconds between each shot. Maybe I messed something up but i'll give it another try.

I've put that little project on hold for now and moved on to something else, but hopefully I can come back to this soon.
 
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