GoPro Hero 10 Black – 1/500, f/2.5, ISO 100, Average Meter

Today was a weird day for the PotD. I originally planned on another astrophoto shot. I stayed up way later than intended with my tripod and 5D set up outside in the backyard. I set up the remote control to be used as an intervalometer. I planned on 60 shots of 25 seconds each at f/5.6 and an ISO of 1600. What i didn’t plan on was not getting the focus absolutely right. More on this further down the post…

As you can see from the PotD, it’s another ‘Getting Close to Mother Nature’ shot. I set up the GoPro again, only this time it was very close to the ground. I also set it for a narrow field of view. I set the camera to take one shot evry 5 seconds for an hour – 720 total shots. That was the hard part – looking through all those photos. I came up with a view good ones. These two were the best.

As for the star trail photo, the camera is centered on Polaris, aka the northern pole star. While my knowledge of the stars is quite rusty, suffice it to say that It lies almost in line with the axis of the Earth’s rotation, so whilst it does move slightly between shots, all the other stars appear to ‘rotate’ around it, producing the swirling effect. In any case, the stars were slightly out of focus so it became a secondary PotD. This is a merge of 57 photos stacked in StarStaX.