Your next mission, should you choose to accept it, will be to capture some
decent lightening. The following mission will be Aurora Borealis.

    I was using the D70 for the same thing yesterday evening.  I set
up with a 16mm fisheye and a 20mm f2.8 wide angle (starting with the
fisheye).  I did a bit of chimping early in the session, and discovered
that from where I was, I got better color at f16 instead of f11 or f8.

    These lenses had no CPU, so TTL metering was not an option, but
I would not have expected TTL metering to do well with wildly varying
illumination levels anyway. :-)  But f11 was a good starting point.

    After a number of shots, I decided that I would do better
switching to the 20mm.  Perhaps even 25mm would have been better, but
things tended to move around a bit in the sky, so I decided that the
20mm was the better one to stay with.  And my next step up in focal
length was the "28-105mm f3.5-4.5 D", and I felt that I could probably
get sharper images from a prime 20mm than from the zoom.

    I shot these in RAW, but I ran them through a quick-and-dirty
shell script using "dcraw" to produce jpegs from them.  (I've really got
to compile and install the necessary libraries so I can convert to
TIFF.)

    It *was* nice to be able to chimp and adjust the exposure.  The
last time I did this, it was with the NC2000e/c (Nikon N90s with digital
back from Kodak), and that had no display, so chimping was not an
option.  As a result, I discovered that everything was seriously
overexposed. :-(

    Here is where a wired remote control would have been very nice
to have.  I don't have the IR remote control, and I was not sure ahead
of time whether there would be other cameras nearby with similar remotes
which might interfere with mine, but that turned out to not be a
problem.  I did have to crank the tripod up a bit, as a woman in front
of me moved to the back of her blanket shortly before things started,
and I needed the extra height to avoid having the silhouette of her head
in the bottom of the frame.  This meant that I spent a lot of time with
my hand extended up to reach the shutter release button. :-)

    Enjoy,
        DoN.