I use a telescope. I have a pentax optio 550 that I just push the lense right up to the eyepiece. it can focus and gather light very easily; the light that comes out of the eyepiece without a moon filter is extremly bright, and so I have no trouble taking photos. Otherwise you just have to get the biggest lense you have. and take a rather fast exposure towards the moon, and crop it in a editor. This was my first time ever tring star trails. Where I live we have around 10 stars; so I had to go out into the country to find stars again. I tried a few at 2.8 ap. but I found to much light pollution came in; although I did get all the stars. next tried on a lower ap., but left it out for longer. this worked for me; I didn't get as many stars, but I still like my results. The image here doesn't show some of the smaller stars I was able to get. I also contrasted the image because there was still light pollution to get rid of; this unfortualy got rid of some of the stars. Just keep tring, and you will get great results. Good luck. Michael
I was wondering how you managed to get a clear shot of the moon, Great combination of shots! I haven't tried star trails yet, but my digital shots of lightning in the darkness haven't been too succesful yet, may be a change is needed!
Very nice, clean capture on the star trails, particularly considering that it's digital. That's about as dark a background as I can get where I live on 100 speed film with a 5 minute exposure, and my trails aren't nearly as long and nice. And, excellent crater detail on the moon, I know how hard the focusing can be on that. Creative combination of the two images... never occurred to me.
0 
