[Finntax]

A single shot from last October in Kuhmo, Northeast Finland. K-3 + DA 12-24 @ 12 mm / 30 s.

[SunValley]

Tried out the barn door tracker I built last night. I have to say it worked really well. I was able to do 30sec shots with a 50mm and 135mm with no trailing. This is Sirius with the A-135mm. 7- 30sec exposures, stacked in DeepSky and edited in LR. Still getting the hang of it.

Lovely shot, stars are pinpoint sharp. That tracker looks real promising.

[Kendigitize]

I'm looking forward to the summer and the Milky Way with my Rokinon 16mm F2 and the barndoor.
Here's a single 58sec exp of Sirius. SMC A-135 at F4 iso400. I'm happy with it.

[ajzimmerman]

Right now I guess I'm just trying to see what works. I think the stars look better when I raised the Fstop to 3.5. I raised the ISO to counter the fstop raise, so it wasn't just a shorter shot.

I really had trouble shooting with Pentax K3's interval shooting. I set the space between shots to even 11 whole seconds, and it still would like...quit shooting halfway. It wasn't even a composite shot, so I can't see why it would be doing that...they were just interval shots...

[Kendigitize]

Right now I guess I'm just trying to see what works. I think the stars look better when I raised the Fstop to 3.5. I raised the ISO to counter the fstop raise, so it wasn't just a shorter shot.

I really had trouble shooting with Pentax K3's interval shooting. I set the space between shots to even 11 whole seconds, and it still would like...quit shooting halfway. It wasn't even a composite shot, so I can't see why it would be doing that...they were just interval shots...

The interval is the time of your exposure + the time you want in between shots. So if your exp. is 25 sec and you want 5 sec between shots, you would enter 30sec as the interval. On my K-30 you need to experiment with the timing a bit, if the long exp. noise reduction is taking too long. I don't know if that's a problem with the K-3 though. You can still go higher on the ISO and going to 3.5 sharpens the stars a bit, so your in the right direction.

[ajzimmerman]

The interval is the time of your exposure + the time you want in between shots. So if your exp. is 25 sec and you want 5 sec between shots, you would enter 30sec as the interval. On my K-30 you need to experiment with the timing a bit, if the long exp. noise reduction is taking too long. I don't know if that's a problem with the K-3 though. You can still go higher on the ISO and going to 3.5 sharpens the stars a bit, so your in the right direction.

There are two settings for the interval shots. One is the interval. The other is the Time between shots.

I guess this just confuses me more.

It's not just the K3, the k30, 50 etc. all work the same. You need to account for the exp. time, the time it takes to process the dark frames, if it's a long exp. or high ISO, and then add the time you want between each shot. It takes a little trial and error to get the interval your happy with. My setting when I take 12 sec exp at ISO800 is about 28 sec interval, and I get about 4 sec between shots. (But it's really 16 sec between shots because of the processing time.

I found your post here. I'll experiment. My experience thus far is that it works for around 4 shots out of 15, and then quits.

[ajzimmerman]

Here is my latest shot. Lately I have just been practicing taking shots. I don't think i'm ready to do stacking yet.
TBH I tried stacking and the DSS program always outputs a crappy image. Not sure why.