For the last two nights I have been outside in the evening watching the Perseid Meteor shower, no pictures of that unfortunately, they are too fast and hard to get a photo of them. I was however taking some more pictures of the stars in the night time sky trying to perfect the settings with mixed results. What as of interest while shooting some pictures was the amount of light pollution that Bolton, Toronto, etc. throws off, even at midnight you can still really see it on the horizon as depicted in the photo above. You would think that Caledon is far enough north of Toronto and urban areas that it would be darker but the truth is it really isn’t, as urban sprawl heads further north so does the light pollution it gives off at night. The photo above was taken with my 25mm fixed lens, F2.8, IS0400, 20 second exposure in manual mode.

Ever since moving to the Caledon area and now that I have a better camera I have wanted to play with taking some shots of the nighttime sky. Last weekend it was clear enough to take some pictures so I went outside into the bitter cold around midnight and setup my cam on the tripod. It took a while to figure out the right settings, this was actually my second attempt at taking pictures of the stars, the first time was not so successful but I learned a fair amount from that experience. This time it returned much better results. In the first photo you can see the light pollution of our urban cities on the horizon, Orion is also visible. In the next two pictures below you can see the Big Dipper. Click on the images for larger pictures. In case you are wondering, these are my camera settings: Manual Mode, Exposure 20 seconds, IS0-800, Fstop 3.5 @ 14mm