Starry Starry Night

With no moon Visible and an unseasonably chilly night affording relatively clear skies, I thought tonight would be a good time to go look at the stars up near the garage.

These cabbage trees sit directly under the southern celestial pole, but without the time to do a star trail shot I thought I'd try something a little different.

Usually my stars shots are all shot with prime lenses, mostly 12mm and 8mm on the Fuji system. Tonight however I thought I'd try something else, so I've used the 16-55 f/2.8 zoom and then shot on the bulb setting, zooming in and out to create the vortex-like patterns of stars emanating from celestial pole. To achieve the look I shot for 15 seconds at 16mm and then zoomed to 55mm and back six times bringing the total exposure time to around 27 seconds.

There's a little dusting of cloud cover, but In this top right you should be able to see one of the Magellanic Clouds, a nearby galaxy to our Milky Way.