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I'm planning to shoot the Leonids with a 50/1.8 lens and a
wide-angle lens (28/2.8 or 20/2.8) using Ektachrome P1600 on an equatorial
mount. Generally, the advice for meteor photography is to use the lens
wide open and a fast film, but given the film's high reciprocity failure,
stopping down the lens will allow me to triple the exposure time (calculated
using Covington's exposure program) before running into sky fog along with
providing sharper stars. A similar effect applies for developing the film
at ISO 800 instead of 1600. What is the best combination of film speed and
f-ratio, keeping in mind the high reciprocity failure?
-- Alson Wong Riverside Astronomical Society http://www.rivastro.org/ Visit my Web page at: http://home.earthlink.net/~alsonwong/index.htm There are a number of factors involved in successful meteor
photography, and most of them are compromizes. Stopping down your lens
will rob you of the ability to record many meteors. You need maximum
aperture. Also, wide angle lenses may increase sky coverage, but their
smaller apertures limit the number of meteors you can record with a given
film. These and other factors are addressed on my web site at http://www.robertreeves.com/metphoto.htm
As for films. personally I'm going to a dark sky site and use
Superia 800.
Robert
Reeves
reeves10@swbell.net
520 Rittiman Rd. www.robertreeves.com San Antonio, Texas 78209 210-828-9036 USA 29.484 98.440 200 meters |