Astronomy, Photography and Weather

Just been experimenting with the AEO trigger to see how quick the camera responds to the trigger activation. For a realistic test I used a second camera and set the flash to on and stood 40 feet away from the lightning trigger, as soon as the flash fired so did the trigger activating the camera so far so good bearing in mind this first test was under day light conditions (camera setting 1/1000s). I checked to see if the camera had caught the flashing firing, and I wasn’t surprised to see the camera did not capture the flash under the lighting conditions. Test number 2 carried out in doors with no lighting. For this test I set the camera shutter speed to 1.3s and used an old cigarette lighter to create a flash of sparks. When striking the lighter the trigger activated the camera but there were still no images of the sparks however, when striking the lighter harder I did mange to capture the sparks. There is slight shutter lag time from the activation point which is going to vary depending on your camera. It’s going to be interesting to see if the lag time will effect capturing that first bolt of lightning or will it just trigger the shutter mechanism to capture the subsequent bolts within your exposure time set. I have seen many images and videos of people using this device and capturing the first bolt of lighting with great results. Just need some storms to truly test this one.

(http://www.redditchweather.com/aeo-test.jpg)

Very interesting!  Looking forward to seeing somemore results! :)

Umm - I don't know how the unit operates, but with cameras there is a delay between the shutter press and the shutter opening, this is partly due to the autofocus mechanism & partly to the mirror having to get out of the way. Try using manual focus (prefocus to infinity for lightning) and using the mirror lockup function, this should improve the response time by a large factor.

Thanks Brian, good point regarding the mirror will try again to see if that helps as you say it should do.

Thanks