Long Exposure:Startrail at St Begas, Bassenthwaite

Trust me to try this on one of the coldest evenings of the year - a drive round to the far side of Bassenthwaite Lake, set the camera up on tripod and take 150 30-second exposures. I've joined them together using a piece of German freeware called startrails.de. The reason of using a large number of shorter exposures is that it minimises noise on the picture. A single 75-minute exposure, even shot at 200 ISO would have so much thermal noise it would be un-viewable.

I fired a flash on a few of the exposures to lightup the church.

16mm lens, 1600 ISO 150x 30 sec exposures at f4 (total exposure time, 75 minutes)

Just standing out there for an hour and a quarter, looking up at the sky was amazing, I was treated to a barn owl that flew overhead, and three shooting stars, but they were too faint to register on the image.