I guess this is not such a novel idea, but it was fun to do anyhow. I put the camera on the tripod and pointed the 210mm at the moon. Had "Nikon Capture" running on the laptop and exposed a picture every minute until the moon disappeared from the view finder. Took a very long exposure at the end to get the background right.
Used "The GIMP" to assemble the various images into a single picture.
Yes, Nikon Capture 4 Camera Control is pretty cool, Mark. While the camera is connected through USB, you can remote control all aspects, modify all settings that you can control from the on-camera menus and dials (and then some), and take pictures both one-by-one and in time-lapse mode. You pick the delay (hours, minutes, and seconds) between the pictures, and the computer (in my case the laptop) controls the camera from that moment on.
After each exposure, the picture is copied immediately to the computer?s hard disk so that you won?t run out of flash disk space even for long sequences of exposures.
In my case, I had the camera on manual and I used the 2x view finder magnifier to get the moon sharp. I also selected most of the exposure parameters manually (e.g., no automatic auto focus or exposure control) as I wanted the settings to be consistent over the entire period of nearly 30 minutes.
In a different case, you might want the camera to select some or all of the parameters automatically (like auto focus, white balance ?)
Another cool feature is the ?Save Camera Settings? and ?Load Camera Settings?. I find myself inadvertently chance camera settings (fat fingers on the dials I guess) and my preferred settings are slightly different than ?factory default?. This way I can simply load my default settings once a week or so.
You can also load special correction curves into the camera and fine tune white balance. A friend of mine did that and is pretty happy with the results, but I have no hands-on experience yet. I guess I need to learn more about color control before I?d want to do that.
Thanks for looking and commenting. I?ll try some more of these and post if they turn out well.
I think both of these are extremely clever, Jurgen. Maybe it's been done before, I don't know, but this is perfectly composed and exposed to perfection.
When you say that Nikon Capture was 'running the laptop', what do you mean? I have the program and have never used it. (of course I have it on desktop). Is there some function that will trigger the camera if attached? This is interesting stuff!
0 
