Be Excellent To Each Other

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8197303.stm



Like, err, soon.

And stuff. Look up, my friends, and wish upon a falling star.

I thought this was last night... we looked and couldn't see anything as it was overcast.

I'm have look in a bit and will make Xbox voice recodrinds of "ooh!" and "Ahh!" an so on if you want.

We've got complete cloud cover here.

Been seeing loads here. Going to go out again later see if there's more

I'm going out now to see if the clouds have gone.

I was asleep.

it was cloudy out the back of the house and the street lights out the front polluted the sky too much.

Hi Perkies & Co, sorry you missed us
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I live in London, where there aren't any stars. I bought an star-map thing that projects stars around the room for the wife because she complained when we moved here. That has shooting stars sometimes. It probably wasn't as good.

Did any of you get any photos?

No, I was going to try as my compact camera has a really good 1 minute exposure mode but when I went out it was all overcast. I did glimpse one between a gap in the clouds though.

I saw them last night, where there were breaks in the cloud.

It was too cloudy, which was a shame. We went last year (or maybe the year before) to see a few from the lookout at Epsom Downs. There were tons of people there, and we saw a few shooting stars.

If it's clear tonight I might go down and take the camera, although we've passed the peak time for it there should still be some to see.

I was having a play with it on holiday trying to get photos of stars and also leaving the shutter open for ages to get star trails. It worked, in a way, but wasn't brilliant - but as a first time I was reasonably pleased.

I saw maybe 15 or 20. Very pretty!

I tried, could see them fine but no luck.

This was at the farms about 5 miles from home when it was still quite cloudy. I had to point it at clear skies & hope for the best,& this was near the highest point on the Fairlie Moors, there was less cloud & light pollution but still no joy

That first one is very nice anyway.

I might try this tonight, with the SLR.

Good luck
I followed the advice here.

Cheers, I'll give it a go. Anyone know how to do completely manual shutter operation on a Canon EOS 400D? It has a timer you can set to "silly" but you can't cancel it once the exposure begins.

I could read the manual I suppose.

Don't think you can. When I was doing fireworks I went with the "piece of card moved rapidly over the lens" approach, which worked pretty well.

I avoided it incase it made me blind, and then triffids took over.

Does the 400D not have a Bulb mode?

Yes, the 400D has bulb mode, but you need to be in full manual ("M") mode. Keep increasing the time the shutter is open for with the little dial wheel thingy and after 30" it will go to bulb. When the shutter is open, a timer appears on the rear LCD so you can tell how long it has been open for.

It's pretty useless without a good steady tripod or support though, and a remote shutter button (or cabled one) is very good to have. I've only had a few brief goes with bulb mode, results were shall we say mixed. Good fun though.

Excellent. You can use that, then. Just have a play around with your shutter speeds.



Sound advice for any long-exposure photography, really. You're not going to be able to hand-hold for those shots without them turning out as a blurry mess, or entirely black.

Bulb is great fun. Here's me prancing about with a torch in a field in Surrey.

Ooh, nice pic. A friend has shown me some neat ones that he calls 'painting with light' where the photographer takes a longish exposure at night and shines a couple of hand torches all over a dark foreground object (there's a good one of a sculpture). I've been meaning to try something like that for a while.

I've seen stuff like that, but have never really tried. Long exposure photography like that fascinates me, especially seeing as you can run about the frame with a torch or flash gun and, as long as you never point the light towards the camera, you can remain completely unseen and light up the scene quite brilliantly.

I have done very little night photography, so that shot I posted was just a complete pissabout. It's good fun. Surprised I didn't break my camera that night, though. I was very drunk.

We've discussed that recently. Picasso did it, too.

I saw people trying to do that with flashguns when we went on a semi-organised night photo walk around London. I t hought then that i'd like to have a go with it at some point.

I really should put some of the pics up here, there were some that we were really pleased with. Photos of cities at night do have a certain appeal to them, and it was quite good fun wandering around town when it was dark and relatively empty and quiet.

Oh, I must've missed that one. Do you remember where it was?

Here's one I did using a laser, if I had an artistic bone in my body I could have attempted to draw a picture, but I just scribbled:

That's ace. I see you went for the same cackhanded approach I did.

Too cloudy last night

I saw a few here, but the thin clouds were way too thick for meteor photography. Nice though.

It begins! I got lucky & saw my first Perseid of 2010 last night

Also

On a clear night there are so many lovely stars visible in the sky round here , but it is really rather cold.

Also, I don't have a tripod anymore, and in the southern hemisphere we won't see quite so much of the perseid shower as they are coming from quite close to our horizon, which is a shame

I might still try and got out and have a look though.

I think I dreamt I saw one last night. Or I did. I'm not sure.

Watch out for this tonight maybe!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac ... earth.html
(sorry about the crap article).

Grey skies here

Has this happened yet? I want a mass ejection!

Supposed to start some time tonight, I've heard (although as I type this it's already half-way to being morning in Blighty).

Grey skies here. The power and internet still seems to work as well.

I have spent the morning trying to escape from a rampaging lorry and an electric bread knife just tried to cut my foot off though.

/puts on AC/DC

Nah, Slash'd put on Velvet Revolver.

Here's what the aurora looked like from here last night (pic courtesy of my in-laws).

Neat... I've always wanted to see some aurora in real life. Hopefully one day.

Where was that taken?

OMFG so jealous.

I've been in decent places* for seeing it a couple of times but never got lucky.
*Nae light pollution & over 60 degrees North.

Saw a reasonable bit (green colour) from up near Thurso a few years ago. Well, it was either that or the leaky nucular plant.

Taken from a lakeshore about 45 minutes north of Thunder Bay, so pretty much minimal light pollution and clear, dark skies. I couldn't really see anything from the city itself - too many streetlights.

Camped up a mountain in the Galloway Forest last night. Just home. Knackered. Was worth it though