Edit Me-Summer Show Off

Last Sunday I shared this picture I took in Joshua Tree. There were a few inquiries on how I did this. Today, I'll tell you.

 First, you need a dark sky. A very dark sky. The night we went the moon was half full. It was soooo bright. But we knew this. We also knew that the moonset was around 1 AM. I started this series at 3 AM. We got there when it was still light out to scout out our location, set up the cameras and made sure we were ready. I also made sure to find the North star. It is the only star in the sky that is fixed and won't move. The other stars will appear to circle it. I just thought it looked cooler this way. If I had pointed the camera away from the North star then my star trails would have just been lines across the sky. You absolutely HAVE to have a tripod for this as well as a remote trigger. I used the wired one as it has a locking mechanism on the shutter button. My camera settings were ISO-100, F-5, SS-30s and manually focused to infinity.. I locked my shutter on for the 30 second intervals then climbed in my car for a nap. I let it run for 2 hours. When I put this together I only used 1 hour of the shoot as the second hour was too close to dawn and the sky was too bright. Also, this pic was starting to look way too busy. So this pic has 105 pictures. That's 52.5 minutes of sky movement.
For editing...I used Photoshop cs5. I loaded the pics in about 10 at a time. The first picture was going to be the main one. I copied and pasted the other pics onto the first one then set the layers to LIGHTEN. That allows the lightest parts of the pic(the stars) to blend in with the original picture. I did this 105 times. I would flatten the image after each group of ten to make it easier to work with. When this was my final result I may have sharpened the image a little but that's about all you can do with night shots.

A few extra tips:
~If it's windy then it's no good. Camera shake on long exposures will ruin the shot.
~Try 1 long exposure(using your bulb setting) instead of a bazillion 30 second ones. That camera needs to stay steady the whole time though. I would try for 45 minutes to an hour.
~You HAVE to manually focus the shot or your camera may retry to focus every 30 second shot. No good!
~Have a fully charged battery before starting a long series(and maybe a spare ready to go). My battery was a champ and went the distance but my hubs battery died after a couple of hours. He was done shooting for the night by the time I started the series for the shot above.
~I shot in RAW but it was a nightmare trying to process 105 RAW files for this. Next time I do this I think I will actually switch over to JPEG. It'll make post-processing so much easier.
~Make sure to spend some time enjoying the sky. We saw sooooo many meteors. It was AWESOME!!!
~Last, I would love to show you a 30 second shot as a before shot but stupid stupid me I trashed them all AND then deleted my trashcan.
~~~If you have any questions that I didn't answer here just ask.~~~