While out doing some astronomy observation this weekend, I contracted the help of one of my friends to "paint a telescope" with light. We tried many different techniques to find one that brought out the scope, yet also allowed the stars to show up. We first settled on using red flashlights. The one problem we did not think about is that the scope was black. Only after the first few shots did we realize that we would need a bit of white light to help out.
You will notice there are 2 different light sources in this first one. The red was not bright enough to light the black scope. I used a white LED light to light up the scope. I left the white light on for 3 seconds in the middle of the 15 second exposure. This way, the stars would still shine through. The red light was left on for the full 15 seconds.
Thanks for the rationale. I like that you went for putting the sky in the same shot without editing, although that might have been an alternative. Looks like you have the G3 at a high iso setting judging from the noise. I've heard that using low sharpening makes the higher equiv iso settings a little more useful on this camera.
We wanted all red, actually, so that we would not damage our night vision (red lights preserve night vision for viewing deep-space objects) or disturb the other astronomers' night vision. However, the red lights were not enough to illuminate the black telescope. So we used a white light (LED) flashlight for the 3 seconds. The fall off was great, and the red light added a neat effect to the legs, which were brushed aluminum and would have blown out completly...
Creative solution for a worthy goal. I don't understand why you didn't want white light on th e legs as well, maybe it was difficult to separate the telescope from the ground that way?
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