The evening of our 3rd day of our 2011 New Mexico vacation I decided to take a stab at some time-lapse astro-photography. Using a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, battery grip with two LP-E5 batteries, Transcend 16GB 400X CF card, Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM lens, old heavy Bogen tripod and pan-tilt Bogen head, and a cheap knock-off intervalometer I set the scene up while it was still light out to adjust focus ect. Then at 10:43PM I started 31 second exposures at f/2.8, ISO 1600, custom kelvin at 5000K, with a 4 second delay between frames. I didn't use live view or mirror-lock-up. I left frame pre-view off so the back LCD screen wouldn't light up the woods behind the cabin; although, there wasn't anyone too near this area, I just didn't want my rig to call any attention in the middle of the night while it was shooting the time-lapse.

The result was good, but I've learned a lot and I intend to share some pointers in the future. Even taking a dark frame at 31 seconds with the lens cap and negating this frame from the rest to remove all the hot-pixels, it still produced dust-like spec anomalies that needed hand cloning out each and every frame. This made it better but at a slight cost of yet another anomaly which you can see if you look close.

I need pointers to help me out with the hot/dead pixel issue when shooting night sky time-lapse.