Instructions for photographing the Perseid meteor shower said to
1) Get as far away from urban lights as you can.
2) use the fastest, widest lens you have. Lock the lens on
infinity in advance.
3) Expose wide open for 15-25 seconds, ISO 1200-2500
I could not heed instruction #1. I was in my backyard 14 miles NW of
Boston MA, a few hundred feet from a well-lit main road.
I used a 12-40 f/2.8 m.Zuiko set to 2.8 and 12mm on an E-M5, original
mark I model. I had the camera on a tripod, used the 2-second
anti-shock shutter delay, manual exposure mode, and had image
stabilization turned off. The light pollution was so severe that to
maintain any semblance of a dark sky over a 20 second exposure, I had to
crank the ISO down to 200.
This is an example of what I got:
http://zone-10.com/tope2/main.php?g2_itemId=20573
Lowering the ISO took its toll. The meteor trail to my eye was brighter
than an ember in a fireworks display.
I also caught an IFO (identified flying object):
http://zone-10.com/tope2/main.php?g2_itemId=20576
These pictures have no post-processing. I'm probably doing something
wrong, but when I tried to darken the sky, the stars and trails got
dimmer as well.
I have a couple of questions about how the E-M5 functioned...
1) Can the Mark I E-M5 display progressive results on the LED screen
during a time exposure? Page 89 of the manual is not at all clear on
what exactly Live Bulb and Live Time do, and trying Live Bulb didn't
seem to do anything.
2) After the shutter closed, it took about 40 blinks of the orange SD
card symbol (~15 seconds?) to write the picture to the card before I
could start the next exposure. Why did it take so long after a time
exposure? The night-sky files were actually smaller than normal
hand-held daylight pictures, running around 5.3 MB, versus 6.4 to 8.4 MB.
----- Larry Woods
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