This is out palace here in Schleswig, Schloss Gottorf. It contains the state’s history museum and several art collections.
This photo had been residing in my library since October and I was never too happy with the result. It was my first serious try to capture stars above a lit building and it made me see one of the weaknesses of my Pentax K20D: I wanted to capture star trails. To not totally overexpose the Palace by taking one extremely long exposure I wanted to take several images and combine them later. Turned out it is not possible to deactivate the noise compression when taking long exposures. So after every image of 30 seconds I hat to wait another 30 seconds for the camera to fight with possible image noise… so when combining the images later instead of a nice trail of the stars I had a stroked line of stars…
In the end I used one of the shorter exposures only, squeezing every bit out of the great dynamic range of the K20D’s Raw-files. I like the result, even if it is not what I had in mind.
Photo data: Pentax K20D, 18-55 mm lens at 24 mm, f7.1, 15 seconds, ISO 400.